Harper ignores cities at Canada's peril

Thestar.com
Aug. 5, 2015
By Christopher Hume

Few Torontonians will shed tears when Prime Minister Stephen Harper is finally turfed from office on Oct. 19. His indifference to this and every other city in the country has made his term among the worst for urban Canada.

Indeed, Harper’s brand of conservatism is notable for its rabidly anti-urban stance. The fact that most of us inhabit cities and towns puts him and his minions at complete odds with the vast majority of Canadians.

Harper’s primitive fantasies about modern life begin and end with his much mythologized “hard-working families,” all of them composed of Mom, Dad, two kids and a dog. Beyond that, the Conservatives have no clear understanding of how Canadians actually live, how hard it is for most of us to make ends meet. Obsessed with the national debt, the war on terrorism, hatred for the Liberals and his need to control, Harper has lost touch with the nation he nominally represents.

The Conservatives’ insistence on the primacy of the individual, for instance, sounds all well and good, but the fact is Canadians live in communities. Take the example of transit, the big issue in Toronto these days. It’s something Harper and his followers distrust instinctively because it smacks of socialism and big government and, as they see it, is mainly intended to help the poor. The poor are poor, of course, because they’re shiftless and lazy. They are to blame, not us, certainly not Ottawa.

As Toronto’s aptly named chief magistrate, John Tory, pointed out recently, “Transit ... provides a means of getting around for people who can’t afford a car.”

Conservatives would much rather help the rich, who in their judgment deserve more because they have more. Unfortunately, most poverty is located in cities. That’s no surprise: Where would you rather be poor? Downtown or in the middle of nowhere?

Still, there is no national affordable housing policy, let alone a transit plan. The last time the Harperites showed any interest in Toronto transit was two years ago when then finance minister, the late Jim Flaherty, agreed to provide $660 million to help his beleaguered fellow conservative and former mayor Rob Ford pay for an ill-advised Scarborough subway.

The fact there’s no justification for such a subway was not an obstacle; in a world where ideology trumps reality, cities are little more than repositories of votes. Politics uber alles.

Whether the other federal parties would prioritize urban Canada remains to be seen. Only NDP leader Tom Mulcair has made it clear he sees the country as more than the sum of its natural resources that it is our duty to plunder. Mulcair, who calls Toronto “the most important city in Canada,” understands that prosperity lies in the knowledge economies of tomorrow, not the dirty and destructive industries of earlier eras.

Harper’s Conservatives have neither the experience nor the intellectual suppleness to keep up with the times. As a result, we have fallen behind even countries like the U.S. As anyone who follows international coverage of Canada knows, we may believe we’re the nicest people on Earth, but the world no longer looks upon us as kindly as we do ourselves.

Starved of investment and undervalued, Canadian cities have reached a point of no return. Though Harper and his followers don’t get it, Canada can’t succeed without its urban centres.

Cities, not dinosaurs from a fossilized nation state, will lead us into the future.

That’s why failure is not only an option, it’s virtually guaranteed if Harper is re-elected.

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