Where are the Ontario NDP Candidates?
Can somebody please explain to me why it is, 10 weeks before an election that we knew was coming for three years, the Ontario NDP has not published a list of its nominated candidates? It’s pretty hard to get elected if nobody knows who you are! Apparently, according to their website, the NDP team consists of 7 elected white men and 2 elected white women (Shelley Martel is retiring). What about the other 91.6% of the ridings? DemocraticSPACE contacted the Ontario NDP weeks ago, and repeatedly (and multiple people, no less), requesting a list of nominated candidates. We have received no response, period. Hello? Ontario NDP? Is anybody there?
August 8 Update: I received an email this morning from Valerie Block, the NDP’s Executive Assistant to the Provincial Secretary with a list of the NDP candidates nominated through August 31st. I appreciate the NDP getting back to me.
August 11 Update: The NDP website finally has a uploaded a list of current nominated candidates.
Should Ontario Expand or Abolish Public Funding for Religious Schools?
With the Ontario election campaign beginning to show signs of life, the long-debated issue of faith-based education has once again re-surfaced. And once again, the issue is polarized along partisan lines. On the one hand, many on the left — including many NDPers — argue that religion has no place in schools whatsoever; ergo, there should be no public funding for any religious schools (i.e. Ontario should do away with funding for Catholic school boards). On the other side, including PC leader John Tory, who would do precisely the opposite — expand public funding for all religious schools (i.e. no only Catholic schools, but Muslim, Jewish, and a wide range of other religious schools). The Liberals, by contrast, appear to support the status quo.
This is one instance where I think the status quo is the best option. Whether those on the left like it or not, separate Catholic separate school boards are a historical fact in Ontario. They were created to accommodate the Catholic minority (including the sizable francophone population) because for a long time, the Protestants (read: the Orange Order and its ilk) tried to starve them out of existence.
Today, the public school boards are secular (i.e. not Protestant), so if we didn’t already have separate Catholic school boards, I doubt there would be an uprising to demand their creation. But, as they are well-established and function well, there is no need to fix what isn’t broken. Indeed, merging the Catholic boards with the public system would surely only hurt the students of both, creating nothing but an administrative nightmare.
But, since the Catholic boards are publicly funded, there is increasing demand to publicly fund all religious schools. Unfortunately, this too would hurt the students. Public funding would necessarily come attached with strings that the private religious schools would have to abide by, which may or may not be desirable. Let’s be clear: private religious schools already exist; the question isn’t whether to allow private religious schools or not. The question is whether they should get public funding. I’m not convinced it’s really in anyone’s interest. If the well-to-do want to send their kids to private religious schools, be my guest. And many religious schools give low-income families a break on tuition if they can’t afford it. So why mess with something that seems to be working just fine?
Moreover, unless there is a commensurate increase in the education budget (which is probably not economically feasible), then it simply means that the same public dollars are being spread over more students, which surely is not a good thing. Also, I suspect that funding segregated all religious schools will surely encourage more cultural and religious segregation — a stark contrast to today, where kids from all backgrounds and faiths attend schools and are exposed to their respective traditions and cultures. I don’t think it is a good thing to promote educational segregation along religious lines. My impression is that the Catholic schools today operate very much like public schools, so the argument that the Catholic boards shouldn’t get an unfair advantage doesn’t really resonate with me. There is little upside to either expanding public funding to all religious schools, or to withdraw public funding from Catholic school boards. Will this administrative juggling result in better results? I doubt it. Therefore, it is worth the angst.
So, let sleeping dogs lie, I say. Decisions whether to abolish or expand public funding for religious schools get people excited — like most philosophical questions — but at the heart of the matter, they are symbolic administrative acts that don’t tackle the core objective, which is to continue to build upon Ontario’s strong education system. Let’s keep our eye on the ball, instead of playing politics with one of our most cherished public systems.
Report Ontario Provincial Nominations Here
We are gearing up for Ontario’s October 10th provincial election here at DemocraticSPACE. Over the coming weeks we will be updating the individual riding pages. We have now added the nominated candidates to date (that we know of ) to the ridings pages, but need your help reporting nomination as they happen, since the parties tend to be slow to publish this information (or in the case of the NDP, not at all). So, if you know of someone who we do not have listed but who has been nominated for any party (or an independent who has received the required signatures), please report it here and we will update the list. If you have a link to confirm, please include it.
It’s the Land Use Pattern, Stupid.
An article in the L.A. Times this morning tells us that Southern California is expected to grow from 19.5 million people in 2000 to 31.6 million in 2050. The article speaks to native South Landers fixation with traffic congestion. People here in SoCal believe that building more roads and widening or decking existing ones will “solve” the traffic problems. They are wrong. More roads = more cars = more traffic. Even building more mass transit (commuter rail, bus rapid transit, light rail, subways) won’t even begin to make a dent.
I would argue that dealing with traffic, at least initially, has nothing to do with transportation. In fact, give the narrow-minded transportation planners the change (narrow-minded in that their singular goal is not to build great cities, but rather to simply move cars around), and we’ll make matters worse. It’s the land use pattern, stupid. The first step is to change the way we build. So much of Southern California was built upon the premise that everyone should have their 1/4-acre of paradise (complete with detached house, 2 cars and a pool), even if the state had to subsidize the infrastructure and negative impacts (to our health and the environment) to realize that goal.
An untested theory of segregating land use — in the name of “modernization” — was put into practice. So, we created separate zones for sleeping, for working, for making things, for playing, for shopping, etc. If you think about it, it’s a ridiculous theory. Obviously, if every individual has to drive from place to place, for free no less (and assuming they have the means to afford personal transportation), to do everything they need to do throughout the day, obviously the theory of unlimited mobility will quickly turn into the reality of immobility (congestion). And so it is today in Southern California. Indeed, Southern California has the dubious honor of being home to some of the most congested freeways in the U.S.
The first step is clear — throw away the failed theory that land uses should be segregated. To do so, we must first abandon the myth that cities are static things that never change. When people talk of “protecting” their neighborhood, they mean freezing it in time. Impossible. Cities are in constant flux, responding to social, economic and political forces. People needn’t fear change. Change isn’t bad if it brings better outcomes for everyone.
Contrary to popular belief, most traffic is actually generated by convenience trips, not work trips. Why should I have to drive to get a quart of milk? To drop off the kids? To pick up my dry-cleaning? To go for a walk in the park? And so on. So, the first thing we need to do is allow (but not mandate) mixes of uses in all development. Developers aren’t suicidal — they aren’t going to put in retail uses where there is no demand for it. It is a fallacy to think that good neighborhoods are made up of only single family detached houses.
Good neighborhoods have conveniences — corner stores, restaurants, coffee shops, banks, grocery stores, parks, libraries, etc. It ain’t convenient if you have to drive for such conveniences. Changing land use patterns to allow for good neighborhoods (as opposed to land-segregated neighborhoods) will require an attitude adjustment to be sure. People must recognize and reverse the racism and class-ism that currently motivates their efforts to deny lower- and middle-income people a right to housing (which is what happens when you prohibit multi-family housing across most of the landscape). Good neighborhoods have a range of housing options, from single family detached houses, townhouses, 5-to-6 story apartment buildings alike.
It all starts with housing. Affluent Southern Californians must acknowledge the massive housing shortage that is caused by the desire to “protect” their neighborhoods from multi-family housing. When housing is in such short supply, competition for the few units that are available becomes fierce. Prices soar. People then must seek lower-cost alternatives further away (and they are lower-cost because the public policy is to subsidize that form of development). And traffic problems accelerate. Taxpayers need to demand better return on investment — why should we pay for all the infrastructure (roads, sewers, schools, light standards, etc) for 4 households per acre when the same infrastructure could supply 80 households per acre? Is it any wonder that California municipalities are, by and large, bankrupt?
So what happens when you allow more compact, more mixed-use development? Initially, traffic gets worse before it gets better, because it takes time for all those conveniences to infill to the point where it is more convenient to walk to a corner store than to drive to the mini-mall. But as neighborhoods become rich mixes of uses, with a range of housing options for everyone, convenience trips decrease. And the conversation shifts from simply moving people around the city, to the things that really matter — how to improve our schools, keep our streets safe, make better communities. And with a 60% increase in population expected over the next 40 years or so, it’s time that Southern Californians change their thinking. If they don’t, they will suffer the consequences. And they will have no one to blame but themselves.
A CleanTech District for Toronto?
Yesterday, arguing that Canada’s innovation and commercialization performance if dismal (citing last month’s Conference Board report), Pierre Rivard made a pitch to create a CleanTech district on Toronto’s Portlands. See Wikipedia’s entry for CleanTech for an overview, but essentially, CleanTech focuses on eco-efficient production techniques, renewable energy, green technology, and sustainable business.
I agree that Canada needs to do more to encourage entrepreneurialism and innovation — particularly in taking advantage of the opportunities that sustainable development affords us. Unfortunately, Rivard’s thinking reflects outdated mid-twentieth century thinking vis-a-vis segregation of land uses, rather than more current ideas of how to build cities and attract investment. I have been involved with three projects that each makes me skeptical of creating a special “CleanTech District” on Toronto’s waterfront.
In 2003, I taught an urban design studio at MIT that focused on the Toronto Portlands — precisely the area that Pierre is talking about. The problem with the Portlands is that it has been seen for, oh about 30 years, as a clean slate for the latest political pet project (Olympics, Expo, Studio/Media District, and now, apparently, a CleanTech district). The land is mostly publicly owned, but split across municipal, provincial and federal levels. So it’s a never-ending political football. Indeed, virtually nothing has happened in the four years since we did the studio. Given than Toronto is expected to receive about a million more people by 2031, it is clear that Toronto needs to build new neighborhoods. If we want to practice what we preach about sustainable development, we need to build more compactly with higher densities (high enough to support transit and street retail).
That doesn’t mean we need high-rises, though. Mid-rise housing built to the street with gardens in behind provides as much density as high-rises (because high-rises need to be set well back from the street). Believe it or not, a project with three 30-story towers set back from the street (covering 10% of the block) has the same density as 6-story buildings that are built to the street (with 50% private open space on the inside of the block). Both have a floor-area-ratio (FAR) of 3 (i.e. 3 times as much floor space as land area). So density doesn’t mean high-rises.
In our studio, we proposed several new mixed-use neighborhoods in the Portlands that would accommodate about 100,000 people, public spaces, schools, churches, etc and yes, jobs. That is, we should build city — that is, accommodate the full range of activities that makes cities. We explicitly rejected single-use districts that target one particular industry. I’m happy to have CleanTech in the Port, but the idea that it needs to be concentrated in one particular zone of one city is overly simplistic and would create a missed opportunity to build a real extension of the city.
I was also involved with a project with University of Cambridge (UK) that looked at the relationship between innovation and built form. Basically, the university wanted to know how it should grow, attract creative talent and turn those ideas into commercial products. They wanted to know what kind of built form would be best suited to accommodate that growth going forward. We looked at the Silicon Valley model (corporate office parks), but concluded that Silicon Valley was successful not because of the kind of physical environment, but rather in spite of it. We looked at more recent examples that suggested, to simplify things, that innovation didn’t happen in the cubicles, but rather over coffee in a cafe or other informal places. This led us to conclude that the built environment should be quite urban, with lots of informal places to meet, and be flexible enough to change over time. This suggested that the new creative economy would depend not on the 1980s corporate campus model but rather centrally located, vibrant urban environments.
Finally, I also taught a studio in which we worked with Electronic Arts (EA) — the gaming company; they had just chosen Montreal as the site of their new east coast corporate HQ precisely because it was such a nexus for creative talent. They argued that their workers — who were 28 years old on average — wanted to live and work in an urban setting. So came up with an urban design plan that integrated EA into a new urban landscape just south of the downtown and west of Old Montreal (where a lot of tech companies had located). Rather than a closed “campus”, EA would be very much a part of the urban streetscape. Again, it wasn’t a singular “tech” district, but one which had lots of cafes, restaurants, bars, bookstores, and housing.
The basic message is this: don’t sacrifice opportunities to make real city in an effort to attract one single use. These sterile single-use districts do not encourage innovation. On the contrary, mixed-use urban places with opportunities for informal conversation are more likely to attract creative talent and generate innovative ideas. So yes, let’s attract CleanTech to Toronto, but seek strategic sites throughout the city, rather than fall back to an outdated model of sterile single-use “districts”.
Vote for MMP
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“The three of us reflect three competing, democratic, partisan traditions in Ontario. We differ on many matters of public policy. We strongly unite, however, in our commitment to an electoral system that is democratic in more than name. The Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform produced an imaginative and practical proposal that will give us more choice, fairer results and stronger representation. We urge all Ontarians to come together and vote Yes for MMP in the October 10 referendum.”
Carolyn Bennett, MP, Liberal Party
Ed Broadbent, former NDP leader
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