A detailed look at how the major parties’ platforms will affect 905 communities

The big local issues of traffic, affordable housing should be top of mind

Postcity.com
Oct. 16, 2015
By David Fleischer

We cast votes as fathers and mothers and students and employers and employees and taxpayers. We cast them out of fear or because of foreign policy or maybe even haircuts, but we should also look at what the federal parties are going to do for our own communities.

Canada’s population has mostly been urban since the First World War, and, as a Queen’s University study showed last year, about 2/3 of Canadians now live in suburbs like ours. As the Federation of Canadian Municipalities likes mentioning, 92 per cent of your tax dollar goes to the two upper levels of government. With the remaining eight per cent, our local government has to collect garbage, put water in the taps and cope with more expensive matters such as affordable housing and transit.

The latter two are particularly crucial since every one of us knows how bad traffic has gotten in our neighbourhoods, and the steep increases we’ve seen in our homes’ values have consequences for people still trying to get into the market, especially given the dearth of apartments and other more affordable units in York Region.

So, what (if anything!) do the major parties propose to do to resolve this imbalance?

Conservative

The Harper government’s response to infrastructure and transit has been interesting. First, Jim Flaherty, when he was finance minister, famously told municipalities that fixing potholes wasn’t any of his business, but when the recession came, the government was perfectly happy to wield pothole-patching as a job creation tool. The government has offered piecemeal funding to transit projects including our own Spadina subway extension as well as the poorly conceived Scarborough subway plan and John Tory’s not-really-planned-at-all SmartTrack. But they have, to their credit, finally announced long-term sustainable funding for transit. The problem is it doesn’t start until 2017, and even then it will top out at less than $1 billion per year, for all of Canada. On housing, the CPC recently renewed their New Building Canada Plan that pledges $14 billion over 10 years for “nationally significant municipal infrastructure projects.”

Liberal

Justin Trudeau has pledged to end the embarrassment of Canada being the only G7 country without a national transit plan, introducing a coherent strategy and at least 10 years of reliable funding to implement it. (Indeed, the Liberal website specifically mentions York Region needing $1 billion for transit, and that doesn’t include the $3 billion Yonge subway extension.) Canada has a similar issue with housing, and again, the Liberals have pledged to create a long-lacking national strategy that recognizes how the issue affects poverty, aboriginal populations, middle-class families, seniors and others.

NDP

First founded as a rural party, the NDP have been working at becoming an urban champion. Former MP Olivia Chow, for example, tabled a fruitless private member’s bill calling for a national transit strategy, and having an urban agenda is something they’ve worked hard developing. Not surprisingly, the NDP’s “better transit plan,” sounds like Trudeau’s idea, and they up the ante, committing another cent of the gas tax to municipalities along with $1.3 billion a year for 20 years for transit. The NDP have pledged to continue the existing government commitments and, like the Liberals, to introduce tax incentives to stimulate rental unit construction.

Green

The Greens propose a national housing strategy based on the “housing first” principle that getting people in need into housing is a prerequisite for improving their medical, employment and other issues. The Greens will similarly create financial incentives for developers to build more affordable units. Their transportation focus is on high-speed rail and “green” technology, but even if it’s in vaguer terms, they also pledge to increase funding for sustainable transportation.

However things play out nationally, our ridings tend to be battles between the Conservatives and Liberals, so if the Orange Wave comes ashore here, it will be newsworthy indeed.

I know there are a host of issues. But it’s important to look at what’s at stake given our communities and the challenges they face as they grow and change.