GTA mayors tackled divides at Ryerson forum

Ideas floated include giving non-citizens the vote and making transit free before 7 a.m.

Thestar.com
May 13, 2015
By David Rider

Giving non-citizens the vote, having mayors live for a while in low-income housing and making transit free before 7 a.m. were cited Wednesday as ways to bridge the Greater Toronto-Hamilton region’s many and deep divides.

The ideas were incubated and field-tested on the mayors of Toronto, Mississauga and Ajax on during a Ryerson City Building Institute forum based on the Star’s Divided City-United City series.

Teams of experts pitched concrete bridge-gapping ideas on the topics of access to services; housing affordability; immigration and identity; income polarization; political culture; and the transportation deficit.

The biggest fireworks of the night came from a pitch to extend voting rights to landed immigrants and other non-citizens, many of whom pay taxes but are shut out of democratic decision-making.

“I would not support the extension of the vote to people who are not citizens of Canada,”

Toronto Mayor John Tory said after Mississauga’s Bonnie Crombie and Ajax’s Steve Parish expressed support for the idea.

Tory said citizenship brings with it privileges and responsibilities and he has long advocated keeping voting as one of those privileges.

Parish challenged Tory, saying there was an “inconsistency” between that position and his statement that it’s a “disgrace” diverse Toronto has so few visible minorities on its council.

Tory was skeptical that non-citizens voting would help bridge the political diversity gap, suggesting better success with a program that educates students on how to get elected, including fundraising.

On a pitch to make all transit free before 7 a.m. as a way of decrease rush-hour congestion, Tory was skeptical, citing the costs of the lost revenue, but willing to look at some kind of pilot project.

Crombie was also skeptical, saying said free early riding might be costly and just shift rush hour earlier.

The mayors used the opportunity to pitch some of their own ideas, including Parish declaring “we need a guaranteed minimum income” to bridge the growing income gap.

In response to a pitch for affordable, good-quality child care for all, Parish agreed and said subsidies should be geared to income.

A proposal that mayors spend part of their first term living in a low-income neighbourhood, such as a month in social housing, got a cool response.

Tory said he’s wary that it would be a “stunt” and he gets more out of talking to residents during low-key visits to poor neighbourhoods.

Crombie noted that she slept in her car for a February night as part of an initiative to understand homelessness but doubted it would be “practical” for Mississauga’s mayor to spend an extended period out of her own home.

“I have a big dog,” she said.