Urban Renaissance Institute

Defending sovereignty

Posted on December 13, 2005 by urbanrenaissanceinst

Conservative Party

December 13, 2005

After years of neglect under the Liberal government, Canada does not have sufficient capacity to fulfill our national and global defence responsibilities.

Click here to view .pdf document

Posted in Agriculture (Urban) | Leave a comment

Strong mayor proposal weakens Torontonians

Posted on December 6, 2005 by urbanrenaissanceinst

Michael Walker

December 6, 2005

Over the past few years, the highly valued neutrality and objectivity of senior staff at City Hall has been methodically threatened and undermined; this proposal would effectively kill it.

At first blush, it’s easy to look favourably on proposals that have the intent of strengthening the role of the mayor of Toronto. Of course, Toronto’s mayor should be strong, and effective too.

Last month’s proposal by the relatively obscure “Governing Toronto Advisory Panel” is an attempt to put this ideal into practice, but with potentially devastating consequences.

The report, entitled The City We Want, the Government We Need, was authored by a three-person panel selected personally by Mayor David Miller.

Approved in principle by the city’s policy and finance Committee over my objections and those of former mayor David Crombie on Nov. 29, the panel’s proposals would fly in the face of some fundamental principles that have guided Toronto’s government for decades.

One of the key panel proposals is to allow the mayor, instead of council, to personally appoint, and dismiss, the city’s top bureaucrat. This would effectively politicize the position, and, in the process, threaten the neutrality and non-partisanship of the entire civic service.

In turn, that deprives us all of the kind of fair-minded, professional advice we expect from public servants, free from political interference. It also means that the civic service would increasingly carry out the wishes of the mayor, rather than the entire council.

Over the past few years, the highly valued neutrality and objectivity of senior staff at City Hall has been methodically threatened and undermined; this proposal would effectively kill it.

Another proposal is to allow the mayor, instead of council, to personally appoint or change the chairs of the city’s standing committees. The impact would be to effectively create a “Mayor’s Party,” and serve as an open invitation to the introduction of party politics at City Hall. If that is the route we intend to go – a route I oppose – then we should debate it openly rather than letting it slip inside the back door.

More important, it would truly diminish the role of the individually elected councillor by creating a partisan voting bloc and eliminating the time-honoured tradition of consensus building by the mayor around individual issues.

Third, the panel proposes a four-year rather than three-year term for councillors.

Why? The best influence that citizens have over the council that represents them is the accountability of an election. To stretch the term to four years weakens and worsens that accountability, disengaging the people of Toronto from citizen involvement even further than they are now. It seems to me that it is premature even to consider such centralization of power in the hands of the mayor before we have a chance to consider the province’s new City of Toronto Act.

What this all comes down to is greater powers for one mayor at the expense of 44 duly elected councillors.

In turn, that means less influence by local people through their local councillors, a move that would fly in the face of the grassroots democracy that has served Toronto well for decades.

Michael Walker is Toronto city councillor for St. Paul’s, Ward 22

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Time to rein in Toronto’s petty despots

Posted on December 3, 2005 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
December 3, 2005

Two years after he was elected to office on a pledge to clean up government, Toronto Mayor David Miller continues to preside over a corrupt administration. This corruption is not limited to the high-profile cases for which Toronto is making a name for itself. Petty corruption is the stuff of daily life at city hall.

It could be no other way under the system of governance now in place. This is a city ruled less by principled laws than by local despots dispensing favours in their tiny fiefdoms. Under reforms proposed last week by the Governing Toronto Advisory Panel, a three-person panel overseen by Miller, these despots’ powers would be reined in.

The local despots – in Toronto they’re called councillors – do more than curry favour through their power: As the advisory panel points out, they act to blindly stop development, discourage business, and otherwise harm the city through arbitrary actions that cater to special interests and political allies.

At root, the panel describes a dysfunctional system in which councillors wield minor powers that yield much harm to maximize their political influence. Any Torontonian needing to deal with city hall is liable to be ensnared.

Take the case of my friend and neighbour, recently afflicted by an illness, who requires a handicapped street-parking spot. There is no question about his entitlement to this spot – his difficulty walking any great distance is evident and his doctor has filled out the requisite government forms – yet this is not enough. Under Toronto’s system of governance, the decision to allow him a parking spot in front of his home in a residential district rests on a vote of the entire Toronto City Council. There is only one reason that councillors have not abandoned this and other powers that should properly be left to a non-partisan clerk in an administrative department: Councillors want leverage over their constituents, to reward friends and political allies who have performed a service for them and to exact gratitude when they have performed some service for others.

One example of the trivial ways in which councillors use their office-holder muscle on behalf of friends and political allies can be seen in a case involving Councillor Olivia Chow, the high-profile wife of NDP leader Jack Layton (and now a candidate for federal office), and Green Beanery, a small non-profit company located in a downtown residential neighbourhood (I am a director of this non-profit).

Chow’s friend, a woman who lives next door to the building that houses Green Beanery, imagines that coffee roasting is occurring at all hours of the night, despite assurances that no such activity is taking place. Undeterred by the failure of other neighbours to detect any overnight roasting and unimpressed by logs from Green Beanery’s security company that confirm no one was present in the Green Beanery building during the hours the friend claimed roasting was occurring, the neighbour sought Chow’s aid.

Chow obliged by triggering investigations that would otherwise never have occurred. Many thousands of taxpayer dollars have by now been spent on a series of frivolous government investigations to appease the imaginings of her chum, a long-time fellow activist and former campaign worker.

These are not isolated examples. Some city services are so politicized that city civil servants often care more about the views of the local councillor than of their own superiors. In fact, civil servants often work for departments that are themselves organized along the lines of city electoral boundaries, rather than logical service territories related to the concern at hand.

The Governing Toronto Advisory Panel wants councillors to lose control over what should be routine and apolitical matters, and to instead become policymakers able to act on the city’s behalf. The mayor, eager to clean up the city’s image and himself shackled by obstructionist councillors, not surprisingly endorses the plan. Also not surprising, many councillors, protective of their petty powers and uncomfortable in the role of policymaker, will fight it.

Torontonians who want a city government that’s clean, let alone efficient and capable of dealing with the policies that confront Canada’s sixth-largest government, should pay heed.

Lawrence Solomon, author of the forthcoming book Toronto Sprawls, is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation.; http://www.urban.probeinternational.org.

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Best immigration policy is the freest

Posted on November 29, 2005 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
November 29, 2005

The pickier Canada gets about the immigrants we allow in, the worse that immigrants perform. Planners inside and outside government have an answer to that problem: They want to get pickier still!

Immigration made Canada great, catapulting us into the ranks of the Western world’s most affluent and fastest-growing nations. A century after Confederation, our relatively open immigration system continued to serve us and immigrants well: Given the opportunity to prosper in a land that gave them free rein, the newly arrived immigrants of the 1970s typically caught up to income levels enjoyed by their native-born Canadian counterparts, and often surpassed them.

Then we got greedy, wanting all gain and no pain from our newcomers. “Immigrants don’t all pull their weight,” some critics complained, pointing to family reunification programs that landed parents and other family members past their wage-earning, and tax-paying, years. “We don’t need unskilled workers,” some unions argued, fearing that labour surpluses would depress workers’ wage increases, and union dues.

To oblige, the federal government started to exclude the “undesirable immigrants.” It trimmed back “family class” immigration. It gave preferential treatment to immigrants with money. Nothing but the best for us, the government reasoned, as it barred the door to nannies and labourers in favour of university graduates and PhDs.

But rather than get us the cream of the immigrant crop, the policies came a cropper, to the surprise of immigration experts. Whereas immigrants who arrived in the 1970s caught up to the earning ability of native-born Canadians in two decades, later waves of immigrants lagged behind, especially when compared to Canadians of equal education.

Canada’s immigration planners, to get better results, then further raised the bar. Again the results dropped, StatsCan studies show, with immigrants taking longer still to catch up. We now have the most restrictive immigration standards in our history „Ÿ 42% of the immigrants we now accept have university educations and 54% have high bank balances „Ÿ and immigrants seem to be taking longer than ever to catch up.

Immigration analysts don’t know why they are getting these counter-intuitive results but most do agree on a strategy: To put more shackles still on the potential newcomer. Although the government wants to attract more immigrants, many in government want to force newcomers to move to areas of the country that have trouble keeping native-born Canadians, and to limit newcomers to occupations the government thinks are in demand. Many outside government, meanwhile, desire fewer but better qualified immigrants: They would have immigrants come at the behest of employers, and then be subject to deportation if the job doesn’t work out.

Both camps are delusional if they believe the quality of immigrant will improve under such strictures. When those in foreign countries consider what country to make their new home, the ablest among them will choose to emigrate to where they are most free to pursue their dreams. Not to where they may be forced to work in a Canadian backwater. Not to where they must work for employers who hold the upper hand, able to threaten them with deportation if they don’t toe the line. And not to where they do not have the right to bring their loved ones with them.

The best immigration policy is the freest one. There are now two credible ways to liberalize immigration: Plan A, for those averse to social engineering, and Plan B, for control-minded planners.

The planners who look at the Statistics Canada data and decry the worsening fate of the poor immigrant will see that immigrants from some countries fare relatively well, even under the burden of strictures. Rather than blindly arguing against more immigration „Ÿ just last week a group of immigration analysts with organizations such as Zero Population Growth and the Fraser Institute announced their opposition to a government plan to boost immigrant recruitment „Ÿ control-minded immigration analysts could discriminate by country, allowing many more immigrants to come, but from fewer countries.

The immigrants who fare poorly by Statscan’s measures come from the countries of Northern Europe and East Asia, among others, while immigrants from the Caribbean and, especially, Southeast Asia, do well. A discriminating policy designed to improve economic performance, and to appease some central planners, might ban Swedes and Japanese and put out the welcome mat for extra boatloads of Thais and Trinidadians.

A better, less-picky plan would open the door to all regions, and especially to the poor, for whom there is no shortage of work. This would be a return to the immigration policies of the past, which served to attract highly motivated poor people to our shores. This is Plan A.

Posted in Immigration | 1 Comment

Why did sprawl get out of hand?

Posted on November 12, 2005 by Other News Sources

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
November 12, 2005

Urban elites and the left have for decades savaged the suburb, arguing that the suburb is environmentally unsustainable, an aesthetic blight on the landscape, homogeneously white bread and morally defective.

A backlash is now well underway, with a slew of pro-suburb writers and policy wonks ─ most of them American and from the ideological right ─ attacking these politically correct views and defending the homes of what has become the majority of Americans. The latest defence ─ an engaging and non-ideological book entitled Sprawl: A Compact History by University of Illinois art historian Robert Bruegmann ─ promises to become the most influential of the lot.

Bruegmann has written a short history of sprawl, showing its ubiquity in societies around the world, and he has written a survey of the present, taking critics to town for their many overblown claims. The American suburb is not unsustainable, he demonstrates. It is not devoid of culture. It is not devoid of diversity. It is not a wasteland.

Bruegmann is good at describing the hodge-podge of anti-sprawl campaigns of the past and how, because sprawl is a vague, even undefined concept, all manner of discontents have rallied under its banner to justify their opposition to developments that displease them. He is especially good at describing the failed attempts by governments to stop sprawl. Queen Elizabeth, in the 16th century, issued an edict prohibiting building at the edge of London and in the 17th century, French kings tried to preserve Paris’s limits. After the Second World War, Britain’s Labour government nationalized development rights on land and created an immense green belt around London. In post-war France, the government built enormous blocks of apartments in the suburbs of Paris ─ the grands ensembles that are now going up in flames ─ to contain the working-class households it was evicting from the central city, and prevent them from settling further afield.

Almost all government attempts to control settlement patterns backfired in one way or another, Bruegmann shows, often because of these measures’ side effects. When governments succeeded, as in the case of Communist Moscow, it required a very heavy hand.

Bruegmann is convincing in describing city and suburb as dynamic and interdependent, and in viewing skeptically the efforts of government to stop sprawl. His history informs and illuminates. But in making his central case ─ that sprawl is inevitable, necessary and desirable ─ he becomes halting and insecure. In taking on anti-sprawl advocates, his arguments become confounding and contradictory.

For example, he fairly paraphrases anti-sprawl advocates who argue that “if the federal government had not built superhighways, subsidized suburban infrastructure, fostered long-term self-amortized mortgages, initiated federal mortgage insurance, allowed ‘redlining’ of neighbourhoods, and provided massive tax breaks for suburban homeowners, many city dwellers would have preferred to remain” in cities rather than move to the suburbs. But rather than compellingly refute the case that the federal government caused sprawl, he strengthens the anti-sprawl case by showing that municipal, county and state governments were all allied with the federal government in delivering the massive subsidies. Even more surprisingly, he then dismisses the critics’ arguments.

“None of these arguments is very convincing” because the cities wanted the government programs, he states. “Most cities and urban areas had extensive plans for superhighways in place already in the 1930s; many of them had allocated large sums of county and state money to begin construction of these roads long before the federal interstate highway program of the mid-1950s. These roads were heavily supported by central city interests because they were considered an important way to rejuvenate the city.”

That the policies of municipal governments might backfire on cities would surprise no reader of Sprawl ─ Bruegmann had repeatedly shown how government actions had unforeseen results. As if to blunt this criticism, he argues that: “Given the strong rebound of many of these cities in recent years, it is altogether possible that, at some point in the future, most people will conclude that they were actually largely beneficial for central cities.”

Maybe. But what would a change in public opinion prove as to what caused sprawl? And if cities actually did gain from sprawl ─ a claim he at no point substantiates ─ why would that negate the many other adverse consequences of sprawl that critics point to, such as loss of farmland and environmental amenities?

Bruegmann, in the end, less refutes than tempers the claims of the anti-sprawl advocates. Throughout much of his book, he seems to be saying, yes, they are right to say that governments promoted sprawl, but the sprawl probably would have occurred anyway, and besides, what’s so bad about sprawl ─ other countries have it, too.

Posted in Causes, History, Sprawl | Leave a comment