I still can’t get used to the fact that modern conservatives are frequently outraged by the way things are going and venomous about the need for abrupt changes, while radicals are relatively calm about the ways things get done and are moderately looking for more of the same, maybe a bit sooner than later.
Conservatives like to use social crises, as Naomi Klein says, as a way of imposing what they insist is a necessary and forceful right turn. But if a real emergency does not exist – as in Toronto, which always gets top ranking for economic, social and governance success – shock doc rhetoric can still stir conservative blood.
I consider this sea change in political moodiness during an evening at old Metro Hall, Wednesday, October 6, as one of two speakers addressing about 60 ethnically diverse city volunteers.
The evening fulfills two of 20 hours of required training in which volunteers donate 40 hours of time at some 175 yearly events that city staff at Live Green Toronto organize to promote environmentally sustainable lifestyles.
It’s not long ago that people from my side of the political spectrum would have been angry about government-?trained volunteers carrying out public policy.
But those instincts have long left me and it’s the far right who rails against use of public money to fund grassroots initiatives. I feel inspired that my city can engage such a wide range of residents to help people they don’t yet know, simply because they care about the city and its environment.
Outraged conservatives can demand respect for taxpayers, but these volunteers, saving the city some $80,000 in wage expenditures, boost city budgets while respecting the city as a living organism in its own right, the municipal expression of Gaia.
City planner Janet Lowe starts the evening at 6:30 pm with a PowerPoint presentation about the city’s walking strategy, designed to “bring Torontonians to their feet.” Walking isn’t the red flag for drivers that cycling is, so it doesn’t provoke angry political demands to banish walking lanes, aka sidewalks.
Roads take up about a third of city space, one and a half times more than parks, Lowe tells the group, and cars are involved in 55,000 collisions a year. As someone who honours taxpayers and still harbours old-?fashioned anger from the olden days, I’m tempted to raise my hand and mention that simple repairs to T.O.’s 7,200 kilometres of road cost the city over $100 million a year. It’s just one small portion of the taxpayer subsidy of cars, often paid by people who can’t afford a car but who lack the righteousness of those who feel they carry all the burden and receive none of the benefits of taxes.
In contrast to my inner thoughts, Lowe’s talk is persistently positive. She explains city efforts to instigate “complete streets” – deliberately planned on behalf of all street users. To create such thoroughfares, Lowe says the city needs volunteers who can count pedestrian and car traffic and interview residents so that planning takes all factors into account.
When she finishes 40 minutes later, the room comes alive with questions and comments, often delivered in thick accents that speak to the city’s emerging style of engaged inter?culturalism – such a rarity and so in need of the same respect as taxpayers, who reap the multiple social and economic rewards of a city energized by volunteering newcomers.
The organizers call a halt to questions so that the second speaker (me) can finish before the two-?hour class ends. After a brief break, I speak about food and why it’s a crucial enviro issue, giving the audience talking points on why Torontonians should feel proud of the leadership our city has taken internationally. We’re host to one of the world’s first food policy councils, food charters, food and hunger action plans and food strategies, for example.
I wrap up and the room erupts in questions, challenges and comments. Two volunteers who’d held food and agricultural jobs in their country of birth enquire privately about the possibilities of starting businesses along those lines.
I realize this is a room animated by people desiring to give back to the city, but also an incubator overflowing with the social capital that can be tapped to nurture a creative class in the food sector. And I think about how interculturalism and engagement can flourish when government looks beyond conventional municipal issues like parks, potholes and police.
One of the first Toronto writers to urge us to respect our place, Eric Arthur, called his 1963 book Toronto, No Mean City. When the best a booster can do is muster up “no mean city,” that town’s in drastic need of self-?respect – a problem that remains acute some 60 years later.
If that city’s promise is respected, taxpayers will be repaid many times over, as social dialogue, intercultural learning, enriched job opportunities, improved air quality, reduced traffic congestion and public participation come into their own, dwarfing anything that penny-?wise, pound-?foolish budgeting could ever accomplish.
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