During my recent run to become mayor of Toronto, one line I heard from a lot of people was that they were considering moving out of town if Olivia Chow won the election. The challenges on our streets have become so dire on a number of fronts—crime, affordability, gridlock—that an exodus from the cities is becoming more likely.
We’ll see how many people make good on their threat following Chow’s victory. These sorts of sentiments have become common, such as how American progressive celebrities pledged to move to Canada if Donald Trump won the presidency.
But this time feels different. There are already people who have left Toronto. Businesses could leave as well. There will also be lost opportunity costs, where investors and individuals who might have come to Toronto will stay away.
Let’s be clear. This isn’t so much about a specific distaste for Chow herself. Rather, it’s the sense that Toronto is in a state of decline and people are at their wits’ end. They want to see Toronto turned around and they believe a left-leaning mayor will only make things worse.
There’s now a lack of confidence in the city itself. This is tragic. And it’s not isolated to Toronto. There’s a general sense that our cities are in decline and too many members of the political class are unwilling or unable to acknowledge the situation and then do something about it.
Last week’s shooting death of an innocent bystander in the usually pleasant Leslieville neighbourhood in Toronto’s East End was for many a turning point in the city’s ongoing descent.
Karolina Huebner-Makurat was a middle-class mother of two young girls who was out walking on the sidewalk to get food when she was killed by a stray bullet. It’s the sort of heartbreaking tragedy that should never happen.
Leslieville has transformed in the past 20 years into one of the city’s trendier areas, with new cafes, microbreweries, and the rising property values that come with such gentrification. It’s the last place you’d expect a shooting.
Except for the fact that there is a drug-injection site in the area that’s been fuelling chaos. For years, it’s been plain obvious that drug sites create localized disorder among the people who use drugs—they act irrational and violent on the streets. But what also happens is that drug dealers flock to where their customers are, and the scum who were exchanging gunfire were part of that system.
No one was surprised to learn that one of the suspects arrested in the shooting has a long criminal record. It’s now been well over a year that the public and law enforcement have been demanding the federal government do something about the lax bail conditions that send criminals back onto the streets to inevitably re-offend. Yet so far we have seen no meaningful action.
The first press conference I gave as a mayoral candidate was to announce that I would phase out drug-injection sites and replace them with treatment centres. The more of these sites that are built in Canada—and there are more on the way—the more overdose deaths, public disorder, and crime we get as a result.
The Toronto Police Association made a social media post right after the shooting death that got directly to the point: “Where is the outrage from the public/local politicians over an innocent bystander being murdered in broad daylight on our city streets?”
We can’t become desensitized to these events. We can’t normalize them. The response should be anger. And any politician who claims the solution to these problems is more social programs or social workers needs to be publicly ridiculed for such an enabling response.
The truth is that Toronto, and other cities, are now suffering from many of the same “broken windows” problems that plagued the urban landscape back in the 1980s. A general sense of lawlessness is once again spreading throughout North America.
We are at risk of a downward spiral, where an inability or a reluctance to tackle these issues head-on only worsens the problem.
If people lose confidence in the safety of their city, businesses will no longer invest, there will be fewer jobs and opportunities, and the tax base will erode. We’ll have fewer funds for law enforcement and basic social services.
This happened to American cities in past generations and it’s happening again now. While Canadian cities aren’t yet as bad, we are trending in that direction. We must act now to stop a further decline.
