Vaughan Mayor Bevilacqua Talks about the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre on CFRB

Cfrb.com
The Night Side with John Downs and Barb DiGiulio
Dec. 2, 2014

There is something exciting happening north of the City of Toronto. A recent story in the Toronto Star talked about Vaughan’s downtown that is beginning to rise the ground – a 400-acre city centre, seen as a key test of the province’s places to grow intensification plans.

John – Mayor Maurizio Bevilacqua was congratulated on the start of his second term of office and he thanked the residents of Vaughan who once again expressed confidence in his leadership.

“And I get to work with a great team here in Council representing more than 315,000 people. We’re going to see some really exciting things occurring here in the City of Vaughan including the downtown core where more than 35,000 will live and work. We have the subway really being the anchor to the downtown core but there are many exciting things – Expo City, the building is up now, a 37-storey building, we have KPMG building coming, 400 jobs, there are a lot of things going on. And above and beyond that, we have a hospital being built here in the City, so, definitely, right now, the City to be is the City of Vaughan.”

Barb – The Mayor was asked how the idea of a downtown will work when a lot of the people who moved to Vaughan and live there now are living in subdivisions. How do you convince them that this kind of urbanization, this intensification with high-rises and bike paths and better public transit is the better future for Vaughan?

“Well every city goes through transformation and it’s actually quite fascinating to see that many people are rallying behind this agenda for change.  Intensification makes a lot of sense of course for many communities, but let’s face it, we’re very fortunate. We have a great location here in the City of Vaughan. We are the only municipality beyond the Toronto border that is actually going to have a subway and that creates an anchor, that type of provincial and federal and municipal investment, you need to capitalize on it. The best way to do that is to create activity around the core where people really view it as the heartbeat of York Region and indeed the GTA. There’s an excitement about it and people are feeling extremely positive about the prospect of urbanization in an area that is typically known as suburbia. There is a paradigm shift taking place, there’s also a psychological shift which is really, really important for city-building.”

John – It’s interesting considering the kind of growth that has been taking place in Vaughan over the last 30 years with all of the subdivisions going in, that there would be such a huge parcel of land seemingly right in the centre of it – 400 acres – that all of this is being built on. How did that come to be that that land was still there?

“How strategic was that? And how fortunate was it that that piece of land remained as it is today when you have a subway coming, so I think that it made perfect sense to hold onto that piece of property, wait until the subway arrives, which is in a few years, and build around it and make the subway the anchor. And people have recognized that with the subway and transit issues being important issues around the Greater Toronto Area, and facilitating traffic flow and reducing congestion, the subway will play a very important role and it will be connected also to rapidways on Highway 7 and other areas here in York Region and in Vaughan. All in all I think a brilliant way to build a downtown core and not to mention all the other things that are taking place here in the City of Vaughan. We have a well-educated population, multicultural, multilingual – what I’m trying to describe here is the real energy of the City. Vaughan is a city on the move, a city that is leading-edge. We’re one of the highest employment growths here in the City of Vaughan. So there is a lot of activity but as Mayor, I’m really so proud of the energy in this city and how people are positive about the transformation that is taking place. There’s been really no pushback.”

Barb – You’ve done a lot toward exciting the people of the city and seeing a lot of this growth happen and you mention transit. And I know I’ve been up to Vaughan a couple of times recently and Highway 7 in rush hour would rival a lot of the downtown City streets for how busy it is. So how will all of this building address sort of the issues that are going on right now with traffic in Vaughan?

“Well as you know with condos there is also lifestyle changes that will occur. By that I mean people that will buy the condos there are people that would normally use a subway. You will find that there will be a shift towards a more pedestrian atmosphere in the downtown core, cycling, there’s going to be a transformation in the city. If you want to take a picture of today’s Vaughan versus tomorrow’s Vaughan, it will be dramatically different. Why? Because of the strategy that we’ve put in place through intensification that really forces people to also change their behaviour. And so when you become urban you can’t have the same attitude that you had when you’re living in the so-called typical suburbian setting. It’s all coming well and the great investment that we’ve made on rapidways and the subway will pay dividends for this great city of ours.”

John – Aside from the subway, why would someone want to live in downtown Vaughan as opposed to other growing areas of the GTA including Mississauga, which now pretty much has its own downtown or even Markham which is growing in that direction as well?

“Well perhaps because we have, you know, we lead the GTA in employment growth because we’ve been able to attract opportunities that speak to a higher standard of living and quality of life that comes with high incomes, as well as having a community where 99 different languages are spoken and it also comes with social cohesion, one of the lowest crime rates in North America. There are a lot of pluses to living in the City of Vaughan, and not to mention, we have great jewels like the McMichael art gallery that is an expression of the arts here in our country and people that enjoy of course, Canada’s Wonderland, and great schools as well and great shopping centres like Vaughan Mills – 13 million people go to Vaughan Mills every year. So I’m just trying to describe to you the type of energy that exists in this city. It speaks to a city that is really coming of age and as I see the buildings in the downtown core rising, as Mayor I can tell you that sky truly is the limit for this great city.”