Host: Toronto is facing a long list of challenges and those challenges go back way back. But experts say it's not too late to change course and revitalize the city. And Golden is a public policy analyst and co-editor of the upcoming book Saving Toronto ten City Builders Tell Us How. And co-editor Ken Greenberg is an urban designer and principal at Greenberg Consultants. Great to have you both, Ken. Great to have you here in studio, and great to have you on the line. And I'm going to start with you. Your book opens with the line Toronto is in trouble. Is Toronto no longer a city that works?

It is in trouble. It's you know, we used to be seen as a kind of New York run by the Swiss, and now we're seen as a city that. You can't get anywhere that you want to get to. You can't afford to live here. And everything seems to be breaking down. Now, of course, that's an overgeneralisation, but it is a city that's got huge problems infrastructure, the infrastructure deficit. When we wrote the book, it was around 44 to $45 billion estimated. I noticed that FCM now puts it over 60 billion. So you're looking at impact on productivity. You're looking at social costs. So there are a lot of challenges in Toronto. We wrote the book as a wake up call because we know that we can do better. We have the answers, we think, and this book is intended to get people to realize we need to change our direction.

All right. With that, I want to read a blurb from the book's introduction. You both write in times of great uncertainty when things go awry. Cities are the fundamental repositories of culture, identity and innovation. Places where faith is kept, where spirit is kindled, and where values that we cherished are preserved. It is our belief that certain events in this particular troubled time have only upped the ante around the challenges we are identifying, and the urgent need for solutions. The success of Toronto as a city and city region becomes even more important. As a bulwark of Canadian distinctiveness. As our cities go, so goes the nation. Ken, what specific challenges are you talking about here?

Well, the ante has been upped by the situation we find ourselves in with the US, for sure. And there is a challenge to our way of life, to everything that Toronto represents. So just take our basic slogan, diversity is our strength. We are probably with all of the difficulties that we experience and they're real. We're living in a country that doesn't have an anti-immigrant party, which every European country does. And certainly the US is being governed by an anti-immigrant party. We are living in a system where we have universal health care, where we are trying to provide education, public education for the whole population. We're absorbing people at an astonishing rate, perhaps even too much. And now we're trying to pull back on that a little bit. But we have a challenge. We are the resistance, in a sense, to what's happening in many other parts of the world, particularly south of the border. And given the problems that Anne has cited, and we both believe that we came to after ten years. We had done the course originally ten years ago, we thought this would really be an opportune time to do a basic check to see where we are and what we can do, and how we respond to the challenge, and how can we draw on our human capital, on the resources that we have, on our talent, on our ingenuity. So the book paints a dire picture of where we are, and at the same time is meant to inspire.

Okay. You talk about human capital. So I have to I have to ask this because our viewers are not just here in the city of Toronto. We have viewers in every corner of this province. So and I have to ask, why should people outside of Toronto be concerned about the city's struggles?

With a two fold answer to that? Jeyan first, Toronto is very important to the province economically. We're close to half of our GDP in Ontario, and we're 20% of the country's gross domestic product. So it matters to this country, the Toronto Thrive, but also the issues that we're describing, reliance on urban sprawl as a way to manage growth, neglecting our infrastructure to the point that we're we actually right now, the way we're financed and the way we're governed have no capacity to actually close that gap. The challenges in all of the services, we can't provide the services because partly how we're structured, partly how we're governed, partly because of the fiscal architecture. It applies to all cities in Canada, more so to the larger cities in some ways, but not you know, I spent a lot of my time up in Barrie and I've spoken there too. They have the same challenges and the related to governance, finance, and above all, in my view, land use and transportation planning and the failure to integrate the two.

And I want to stick with you. I want to get a better sense of how we got here. As you mentioned, you paint a sort of a dire picture here with the rest of the contributors. Did it start with the megacity? How far do we need to go back before we start kind of finding the kind of, you know, points of pain?

It's a good question. And the megacity for sure was a major problem that was done shortly after I had the opportunity to do the report on the future governance of Toronto, and it went in the exact opposite direction. So it's not the only reason. For sure. I'll start with this point that Toronto's the fastest growing city in North America and has been for a few years, certainly the last two years, not counting. Yeah, actually the fastest growing city in North America. How do we manage growth? We manage growth by sprawl, not by building within existing urban borders, even though there's room both for employment growth and for people to live. So by doing that, we're creating a system that we as cities that we can't support. The problem with megacity was that it was both too big and too small. It was too big to be accountable to, to. The people who live there. And at the same time, it's too small to do the regional planning for the environment, for land use and transportation planning, and for, I would say, services in particular, like policing. So it's the wrong size. And so what you have is a province now stepping in and micromanaging. And that is the main problem right now. Most of the issues that we're dealing with today stem from A the governance, B, the finance that the we are cap in hand always to the levels of government with no growth source of revenue of our own. And thirdly, that we have now eliminated the current government has eliminated all of the smart planning policies of the McGuinty of the McGuinty government, which in fact was moving us in the right direction and was much praised for that. But now all of that is gone. And so we've got a lot of work to do. But as Ken says, we have the energy, talent and ideas to do it. If there was the willingness, and that's our hope that this will contribute to the change in the climate of opinion, both for the public and for politicians.

Let's pick up on the idea of micromanaging. I hope I don't get the phrase wrong here, but it's the feds who have the money, the provinces that have the power, and the cities that have the problems help us understand. Can why do cities Canadian cities need more autonomy?

There's a concept called subsidiarity, and it means you take decision making down to the lowest competent level. And of course, we live in a system where we have multiple layers. We have municipal, we have provincial, we have federal, they all have different roles. And I think what's been happening now is our provincial government with Premier Ford really would like to make itself the mayor of Toronto and the mayor of every city in the province and reach down and make decisions that local communities should be able to make. So cutting the council in half in the middle of an election, for example, was an extreme example. But what's going on now is really dangerous. The Supreme Court is actually hearing a case about Ontario Place. And the gist of the case is, can the provincial government exempt itself from all of its own laws? And I just heard this morning that an additional example of that is the Premier wants to remove all of the environmental considerations, all the environmental laws in place over the issue of the expansion of the island airport to accommodate jets. And what happens when you do that is you lose the ability for social cohesion, for people to believe that they have some say to shape their own destiny. And for a city of over 3 million people to not be able to have planning legislation that's effective, to not feel that major environmental concerns can be dealt with scientifically, not just based on political whims of the day. The things like heritage can be entirely dispensed with. This is really problematic. And when people don't feel that government is listening to them or they have anywhere to go, then they become cynical, they become fatalistic, and you'll hear people say, I don't care who gets elected. They're all going to do the same thing anyway, and it's not going to help me. And I think it's really important for cities and towns. And I would apply this to smaller areas to have, you know, that phrase in the American Revolution, no taxation without representation and the Boston Tea Party. Well, we're there now. We're in a situation where vanity projects that we have nothing to say about are getting approved for untold billions of dollars. And we have a provincial government that's saying we don't have to follow our own laws.

I want to add another layer of government. Ken had brought it up first, and let's talk about the US administration. I when I started reading this book, I thought, you know, we would be talking a lot of about Toronto's issues, but I heard Donald Trump or read Donald Trump's name a few times in the book. And I am curious, what effect is the threat from the current US administration having on cities like Toronto?

Well. In terms of the culture and the kinds of decisions that are being made, I just want to build on one point. Ken is absolutely right. It undermines trust. Without trust, people cannot work together to make decisions. And that's absolutely critical. Now, what happened to two things with the Trump and I've written about we've written about this. For one thing, I believe that the culture emanating from the current leadership in America has emboldened the kind of decisions that I've referenced. Like, over use of the M's & O's, ministerial zoning orders, economic zones. In other words, giving ministers or cabinet undue power. But the second thing is, on a very specific note, all of the chaos around tariffs very much affects Ontario from, from, from its economic standpoint. On the one hand, we're being we're looking at a global picture of AI doing. We know not what with the job picture, but likely not very good, not good. And at the same time, you've got tariffs really hurting business. And in particular small businesses, which are the dominant form of business. And so both in terms of the economic context and in terms of the political cultural context, what's happening south of the border is really affecting us. And, you know, part of Canadian resilience must be a focus on the cities. To go back to the point you said, Jeyan as ghost cities, so go our nations.

Ken, I want you to add on to that, but I do have to I want to push back a little bit with these special economic zones. Is there not some benefit to the economy when we see this? I know that there's concerns about, you know, laws and environmental impacts, but overall, this is to get the economy going in some regards. Is there not a no.

Absolutely. And we have the same thing at the federal level. We have a similar bill. But the question is what do you do with the bill? It's kind of like the notwithstanding clause in our Constitution. You don't want to have people just overriding everything and putting very useful legislation aside and taking away the ability, for example, extending the runways and the noise and the frequency of the jets, just to stick with that example is going to extraordinarily disrupt Toronto Harbour. And I don't think people realize that Toronto Harbour as a place of recreation, as a place of enjoyment of nature or the islands. And at the other end, it's going to extend all the way over to Ontario Place. So there should be an opportunity for people to see what is being proposed and to look at issues like the impact on the environment. And the same applies, for example, in northern communities in Ontario, right? Yes. The Ring of Fire, perhaps, but you want to understand what the implications will be. So these things, the pendulum can swing way too far. But I want to add to Anne's point, when we started writing this book, Trump 2.0 hadn't happened and we were merrily going along looking at Toronto through a somewhat secure lens in the sense that, you know, we had sovereignty over our city, and then all of a sudden it wasn't just Canada that was being threatened, it was Toronto. It was a city that was being threatened in so many ways. And one of the origins of our problem, and I find we have to keep relating this to geopolitics, is that we were so reliant on the US as a reliable partner in all kinds of areas. So, for example, all kinds of companies in Toronto were not making the innovations. They were not seeking relationships around the world, which we're doing now. They were not promoting local talent. And whether it was in the arts or culture or in business. And now we are being forced, like it or not. And I think it's actually a good thing. I think the curtain has been pulled aside. We know what the reality is and this can incentives us to look to ourselves in a much more profound way. So that theme kind of crept into the book, and once in there, you couldn't not see it.

All right. I want to change gears a little bit. I want to talk about you bring up the curtains. You you write in your chapter this lovely scene at Regent Park Film Festival. And I want to talk a little bit about some of the wins that the city of Toronto has gotten so far. So, Ken, I'm going to stick with you. What recent projects in Toronto give you hope towards a positive change in the city?

I'm going to take one project that we're every one of the eight themes. And by the way, we chose the smartest people we could find who knew far more than we did about all these subjects. That was the whole premise of the book. Every one of the eight themes works together, and that's O'Quinn, Moonesinghe and Midosuji Park in the Portlands. So governance, you have the three levels of government collaborating for over 20 years, with changes of administration at every level. Funding. This project was well funded from the start and has come in on time and on budget, and has continued to get additional funding environment. It's making a huge contribution to flood mitigation and to creating a green area in the heart of the city, housing, mixed income, housing, mobility, social cohesion. It touches all the bases and what it demonstrates, and that was one of the reasons I brought it up in the last chapter. We know how to do this. We know how to do it as well as anybody in the world. When we put our minds to it, and when we have the right resources.

Ken, and we are going to have to leave it there. I really appreciate your insights on this, and hopefully Toronto can learn a few things from this book, so I really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thanks very much.