The Cheat Sheet: December 16 City Council

Disclaimer: For entertainment purposes only. Check out the full agenda.

Last meeting, we saw the Mayor reduced to a figurehead, with most of his responsibilities (and office budget) going to Deputy Mayor Norm Kelly. In a fit of pique, the Mayor insisted on holding and speaking on various petty routine items until the clock ran out, and promised to do the same next time. I hope he’s forgotten, because there’s plenty of actual stuff to get done. Continue reading The Cheat Sheet: December 16 City Council

Blessed in the city: charity, justice, and the budget

Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the field. (Deuteronomy 28:3)

It is curious that God’s revelation tells us that the fullness of humanity and of history is realized in a city. We need to look at our cities with a contemplative gaze, a gaze of faith which sees God dwelling in their homes, in their streets and squares…In cities, as opposed to the countryside, the religious dimension of life is expressed by different lifestyles, daily rhythms linked to places and people. In their daily lives people must often struggle for survival and this struggle contains within it a profound understanding of life which often includes a deep religious sense.

…On the one hand, there are people who have the means needed to develop their personal and family lives, but there are also many “non-citizens”, “half citizens” and “urban remnants”. Cities create a sort of permanent ambivalence because, while they offer their residents countless possibilities, they also present many people with any number of obstacles to the full development of their lives. This contrast causes painful suffering. (Evangelii Gaudium, paras. 71-75)

If there is any meaning we can take away from the big Budget Committee meeting falling smack dab in the middle of Hanukkah this year, it’s that, after a certain point, doing more with less requires a genuine miracle. As we Torontonians have been reminded, there is simply not enough money to go around. We must choose what to keep and what to cut. Partly this is an exercise for pencil-pushers and infographic designers. But it is also a call to us to articulate a broad, long-term vision of what a city should be and of city-dwellers’ obligations to each other.

Over the past few years of following the budget process, I’ve watched two divergent visions struggle for supremacy. At heart each embodies a different value: Charity vs. Justice. For me it is difficult to disentangle these words from their religious roots — and I think it’s unwise to do so, because the lens of religion permits us to see the true relationship between them. Which I’ll get to. But now: budgeting!

There are some whose goal is to cut spending and shrink government. This is a short-term sort of plan that favours paying off loans instead of making investments, and demands flatlined budgets, which are essentially cuts. For a city department to achieve 0% increases when prices gradually inflate requires putting off projects and new hires, lowering service standards, raising user fees, and falling behind on the least urgent matters, in the hopes that there will be an influx of purified oil cash before the crisis point. Unless there is a change of administration, the cash is never coming, and the system exists in a long drawn-out state of crisis: overcrowded, aging transit; a lengthening waitlist for increasingly dilapidated affordable housing; parents struggling to find daycare.

As government shrinks, it effectively “downloads” social services to non-profit enterprises (churches, charities, food banks) and individuals (couchsurfing because you can’t afford rent, getting a neighbour or relative to watch the kids, asking friends or family for money and personal favours). Rather than being supported through taxes, these “services” are reliant upon grants and fundraising. This is Charity — a fundamentally individualistic, precarious, pity-based model where the privileged benefactor donates to a deserving recipient (whether a person or an organization) out of the goodness of their heart.

In opposition stands a vision of growth and abundance. This is advocated by those councillors who often argue that in one of the richest countries in the world, no one should have to go hungry or homeless. Instead of relying on “means tests” to efficiently portion out access to city services — school breakfasts, recreation programs, childcare — to the most needy, we could work towards a system where these are accessible to everyone. The City is uniquely positioned to take on big goals like these, having excellent financial standing (which makes it cheap to borrow money) and a large tax base.

This approach necessitates selling people on the long-term benefits of investing in social programs and infrastructure rather than short-term savings (“you’ll save $60 a year”). Long-term savings are less tangible, but much greater: the value of an education at a library or in a rec centre; the damage that doesn’t happen when our water infrastructure can cope with floods; people being able to go to work or school because they have daycare taken care of; the shelters we don’t have to open because more people have adequate housing.

The first step is recognizing that widespread inequality is injustice — not just an accumulation of individual moral failings or bad choices. Justice means that we give up our right to determine who “deserves” basic human needs. Justice calls on everyone to pitch in as neighbours helping neighbours. This is not a virtue; it is an obligation, and it must be unconditional.

You can do both justice and charity, obviously — but many people do charity and think that, because they’ve chipped in, there is nothing further they have to do. The ultimate goal of justice, on the other hand, is to render charity unnecessary.

Charity is often associated with religion: tithing, food drives for Christmas, the Salvation Army and all that. This irritates the fuck out of me because justice, as I’ve described it, is also a religious activity, born thousands of years before anyone could even conceptualize “secularism” or became an “activist”. It just happens to be hidden in the really boring parts of the Bible and the Talmud that nobody reads! Look how all these rabbis interpreted these verses about farming to talk about how your income/property doesn’t really belong to you — part of it belongs to the poor, and if you withhold it (or only distribute it preferentially, or make it difficult for them to get) you are basically stealing what is rightfully theirs. (This is echoed by the early Church Father John Chrysostom, who Pope Francis quotes in his recent Evangelii Gaudium: “Not to share one’s wealth with the poor is to steal from them and to take away their livelihood. It is not our own goods which we hold, but theirs.”)

In the Jewish tradition tzedakah is the word for both charity and justice, and Maimonides’ account of the eight levels of tzedakah makes clear that the highest forms of charity are justice. The very best kind of tzedakah is preventing someone from becoming poor in the first place, finding them a job, or becoming their business partner. Next is “to give to the poor without knowing to whom one gives, and without the recipient knowing from who he received”. And so on; you can read the link yourself. He works off the same principle as the other sages: the dignity of the recipient is paramount.

What does tzedakah look like in our city today? At its lowest level it is a cold, hungry, desperate person asking people coming out of the Tim Horton’s for change, and people giving them money just to get rid of them. Slightly above that is a school breakfast program coordinator pleading for funding at a Budget Committee meeting and Doug Ford cutting them a personal cheque. Above that would be situations where certain facilities or services are marked out as “for poor people” or require a “means test” to access — the Welcome Policy, TCHC, Priority Centres. Above that I would say is a city that can provide basic needs for everyone, and where receiving city services is not obvious nor shameful. That would be only the first step to a city that prevents poverty before it starts, and it’s such a lofty demand that any further steps are in the realm of science fiction, not policy.

If charity and justice are ultimately two ends of an ascending scale, why stop halfway, acting on only the individual and not the societal level? And if we really ought to work towards a society that prioritizes not just the physical well-being but the dignity of the most marginalized, why insist on ways that maintain the gap between the haves and the have-nots? That might get you tax credits and personal satisfaction, but it’s no way to build a city.

Isaiah said it best:

No, this is the fast I desire:
[…] To let the oppressed go free;
To break off every yoke.

It is to share your bread with the hungry,
And to take the wretched poor into your home;
When you see the naked, to clothe him,
And not to ignore your own kin.

[…] [Then] the Lord will guide you always;
He will slake your thirst in parched places
And give strength to your bones.
You shall be like a watered garden,
Like a spring whose waters do not fail.

Men from your midst shall rebuild ancient ruins,
You shall restore foundations laid long ago.
And you shall be called
“Repairer of fallen walls,
Restorer of lanes for habitation.”

This passage expresses my approach to the budget, and city politics as a whole, in a nutshell: true city-building starts from the bottom up.

The Cheat Sheet: November 13 City Council

In case you’ve been living under a rock: since the last City Council meeting, Rob Ford’s friend, occasional driver, and probable drug dealer Sandro Lisi was arrested on extortion charges; the heavily redacted search warrant was released, revealing (among many other things) the highly incriminating details of police surveillance of the Mayor; police chief Bill Blair announced that police had recovered the crack video; Rob Ford admitted to smoking crack but refused to step down; the Star purchased and posted a video of a highly intoxicated Rob Ford uttering angry death threats; and comments by his brother, mother and sister revealed the truly shocking degree to which they enable the mayor’s substance abuse. Continue reading The Cheat Sheet: November 13 City Council

Don’t act so fucking shocked

I’ve seen a few people lamenting that the focus is on Ford smoking crack in that video and not his racist and homophobic remarks, and it’s all just too precious. The hard truth is that for the vast majority of people, using an illegal drug associated with poor black people is more scandalous, more outrageous, more offensive, more disrespectable than looking down on people for being black or gay.

Ford has said racist, homophobic and transphobic things in the past. Ford has been publicly drunk and disorderly in the past. Ford has used drugs in the past. None of this proved enough to stifle his career; none of it attracted demands to step down from such a wide range of people.

The thing is? An awful lot of the people in politics and media who are now going after Ford for smoking crack have been racist and homophobic themselves. Toronto Sun editor Lorrie Goldstein trafficking in racist stereotypes of violent, hypersexual black men, city councillor Mike Del Grande parroting “welfare queen” myths, implying that the groups overrepresented in prison just commit more crimes, etc. Councillor Denzil “Boat People” Minnan-Wong.

It’s not just about conservatives. In the original Star story Doolittle and Donovan repeated “Somali” over and over, apparently oblivious to any repercussions to using the video owners’ ethnicity as shorthand. Members of the community, like Abdi Aidid, forced the paper to revise. (The ethnicity of another key player has escaped comment.) It’s not the first time major papers have previously made a mess of covering and commenting on issues in racialized communities. And it’s not just journalists, either. Today on CP24 I heard one leftist councillor — Paula Fletcher, I think — referring to “gangbangers” as she condemned the company the mayor keeps.

All these people, they smoke pot, they drink, they drop acid, they snort coke, and it’s all right as long as you do it on your own time and don’t come to work fucked up…but stooping to crack cocaine in Rexdale…that’s something else. That’s ghetto. It transgresses the social code of this very white and middle-class sphere.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t go after Rob Ford. He is unfit for office and he’ll never be able to do his job until he tackles his personal demons. But he shields himself with the bodies of young black men and they have been collateral damage in this hunt. (Maybe soon we’ll know if that’s what happened to Anthony Smith.)

I don’t expect much worthwhile discussion of all this in the mainstream media, where the vast hordes of straight white male journalists, even if they are not overtly bigoted, tend to be clueless and deeply uncomfortable talking about things outside their experience. While they occasionally get self-righteous kicks calling out blatant racism or homophobia when it’s not one of their own, the industry of political journalism and punditry is structured in such a way that “minority” issues simply don’t get talked about, and definitely not by marginalized people themselves.

So if you want to hammer the mayor on his racism and homophobia, that’s great, but if you want the masses to care you need to take the right angle. Make it about Ford’s hypocrisy, how he pretended to care about his football team in public and then speaks of them dismissively in private, because the kids are more sympathetic if people don’t have to remember they’re black. Make it about how “fag” is a bad word, so people don’t have to confront their own feelings about male effeminacy. And don’t act so fucking shocked when a heteronormative white industry doesn’t see what the big fucking deal is.

The Cheat Sheet: July 16 City Council

I make no claim as to what will make headlines, but these are the interesting items I found. You can check out the full agenda here. Did I miss anything important? Let me know.

The big-ticket item will probably be a new motion to cancel previous plans to replace the SRT with light rail and instead build three subway stops, which won’t go as far, will serve a smaller geographical area and less people, cost about a billion dollars more, and run at a loss. But who’s counting? Since the province is apparently willing to indulge us…siiiigh Continue reading The Cheat Sheet: July 16 City Council

Park aside

A spring afternoon in Trinity-Bellwoods, at a picnic table with a small bottle of Coke and fries with pepper mayo from Chippy’s. Perfect weather, and the time of day when the sun is so golden it hurts.

Just finished reading Cary Fagan’s City Hall & Mrs. God (Mercury Press, 1990), a vivid tour through Toronto’s richest and poorest echelons as they race further away from each other. Pre-amalgamation. A lot has changed, a lot hasn’t. There are many familiar names.

A trio of chirping robins descends on me, sensing uneaten fries. In the shade of the trees the tightrope walkers are practising.

I ought to be writing things. Most immediately, an ebook on internet privacy, but also just stuff in general, like that essay on urbanism and liberation theology I’ve been meaning to prod into shape. Right now everything is building up to the AMC. After that I can catch my breath.

Councilwatching: What’s on the agenda for the upcoming Apr. 3 City Council meeting

The agenda for the upcoming City Council meeting (next Wednesday and Thursday) is out! Some items of interest:

Poverty infrastructure

In Desmond Cole’s story on the City staff report on homelessness, he concludes,

Toronto’s shelter system was never designed to meet the needs it now struggles to address. According to the report, shelters now sometimes serve as permanent or semi-permanent housing for people who should ideally be in some form of assisted-living housing.

And it occurred to me, not for the first time, that this is a defining feature of our poverty infrastructure, a. k. a. the social safety net. Homeless shelters, food banks, and distress lines were only ever meant to be emergency measures. But all of these services have regular users because there is nothing else there to meet people’s basic needs. Instead of permanent affordable housing, people use shelters. Rent is so high that people are chronically unable to afford food, so they rely on food banks. Because adequate preventative mental health care is inaccessible, they call the distress line number posted up by the Bloor Street viaduct for suicidal jumpers.

It is a strained and unsustainable system that various levels of government, which ostensibly want to wipe out poverty, are slowly divesting themselves of, and “downloading” to private enterprises or individuals.

We have essentially refused to hire family doctors, and if anyone gets sick there is no help until you are in such critical condition you need to go to the emergency room. And because the emergency room is only designed to get you out of emergencies, no one will help you get healthy enough so that you don’t need a doctor at all.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled wankery about transit funding. Good night.