The urban argument for coalition government

City residents think suburbanites don’t know how to live and suburbanites think city dwellers don’t know what reality is.

The last 70 years of urban development have created a vast physical, social, economic and political divide for all of North America. On the one side are the virtuous people, living a more sustainable lifestyle and on the other the folks who are positive that people living the ‘virtuous’ life don’t know what reality is.

I’m not sure which point of view irritates me the most. It’s a tough choice. City residents who live in a more sustainable lifestyle are doing so by historical accident and the folks out in the new car based reality do so also courtesy of a similar historical accident. Cities built streetcar communities at the beginning of the 20th century for the same reason they built arterial, suburban tract housing in the second part of the century. They were cheap.

When the old streetcar lines were torn up from coast to coast, no one anticipated the vast dis-economies of scale that would gradually emerge from car based development. Nor was it anticipated that, by comparison, streetcar communities would turn out to have impressive economies of scale i.e. the bigger they got the cheaper they became. The old city of Ottawa, Toronto, New York etc. are examples. All of them were built around streetcar lines.

You can see the dividing line between the ‘virtuous’ life and the new reality dramatically in my old ward. The first shopping centre to be built in Ottawa was Billings Bridge. The old village of Billings Bridge was replaced by a series of vast parking lots and a mall. The city and NCC created four lane divided service roads, picturesque Sawmill Creek was buried in a pipe; and the new adjacent housing developments (Alta Vista and Heron Park) were designed with curls, loops and dead ends for car access.

Drive south from Billings Bridge and you are surrounded by this new landscape. Bank Street becomes six lanes wide, eight at intersections, and is lined with franchises, strip malls and big box stores. The further south you go the bigger the road, the parking lot, and the big boxes get. But turn north from Billings Bridge, and you arrive in the last streetcar community to be built in Ottawa. It’s called Old Ottawa South and was entirely constructed around Streetcar lines.

Here Bank Street is only four lanes wide and there’s a coherent, small business, multi-service Main Street. Houses are built on straight streets (Grove, Sunnyside, Seneca) not curls. The streets are designed to work for streetcars and houses are built within a five minute walk from the nearest streetcar stop. Buses have replaced the streetcars but to this day, there is a high level of walking and bicycling. Driving is not necessary to function in this community. There’s even an old neighbourhood film theater, the Mayfair.

The other thing no one ever anticipated was the political and philosophical divide that would emerge between the two landscapes. It is very clear that the ‘new reality’ is about a lot more than the cost of servicing the streetcar versus the private car landscape. People vote differently in the ‘new reality’. For Rob Ford, Larry O’Brien, Stephen Harper, this is their heartland.

A certain amount of ‘Sturm und Drang’ is healthy for any democracy. Without lively debates, different policies and programs, there can be no choice and no real democracy, but you can have too much of a good thing. Right now Canada has that problem — there are too many serious divisions fracturing the nation’s ability to vote in a coherent, meaningful way.

It isn’t an accident that we have five major federal parties –the Greens, the Bloc Quebecois, Liberal, New Democrat and Conservative. They’re there because Canadians have significant differences of opinion about what’s important and consequently vote differently.

Canada is plagued by fracture lines, great divides right across the country and no amount of preaching from the political pulpit is going to change this. One of those fracture lines is one between the old streetcar parts of cities and the ‘new reality’, but there are many others.

There are those who consider environmental sustainability the number one issue. They tend to vote Green or New Democrat. Then there are those who are worried about crime and the random violence of terrorists, they tend to vote Conservative. Then, there are those who consider the continuation of the French culture and language community as key. If they live in Quebec, they tend to vote Bloc and if they’re not resident in that province, they have strong sympathy for the Bloc. They are not sympathetic to the idea that they must vote for a federalist party, no matter what.

These are not casual differences. They are profound. We are no longer the Canada Pierre Trudeau used to reign over.

When times become complex, there are two political choices. One is to simplify the debate and the response. This has been the Harper approach. Reduce all debate to the basics. The Bloc are bad because they’re separatists – unless you need them for a coalition of your own. Promise and deliver billions in security because everyone can understand the importance of emergency services. And don’t do or say anything about the problems that lie in the dividing lines between interest groups – because there are few votes there for your back-to-basics pitch.

The other approach is to have a political response which reflects the more complex country and world that we now find ourselves in. Coalitions force people and politicians to treat those with diverging views respectfully and seriously, because you might need them to form a government. It’s a political response which can serve the new reality; it makes sense to me. My vote will be for a coalition.

Now how do I do that?

photo by Thorfinn Stainforth