In a sit-down Q&A with The Globe and Mail‘s editorial board published over the weekend, Mayor Olivia Chow swatted aside concerns about whether city council’s half-baked six-plex decision might imperil $30 million in Housing Accelerator funding promised by Ottawa.
“Look at me,” Chow said, striking a strange chord that seemed part cocky, part Alfred E. Newman. “Do I look worried?”
I’ll stick to the higher note, and pose this question: why in the world would an NDP Toronto mayor assume it’s safe to troll a right-of-centre Liberal government with a severe fiscal hangover and budgets to cut? Seems rather bold, at least from where I sit.
It’s true the federal NDP, which Chow represented as an MP for many years, delighted in provoking the opposition Liberals, this at a time well before Justin Trudeau’s minority pact with Jagmeet Singh.
But I’m not sure a Toronto mayor can play that particular game right now. In general, the Canadian federation is built upon the sturdy premise that lower-tier governments can only role their upper-tier counterparts so far before they find themselves on the receiving end of a big-brother/little-brother-style smack down.
And if that happens, Chow can’t say she wasn’t warned: the previous housing minister, Nate Erskine-Smith, who is as progressive as the day is long, told the City that its Housing Accelerator funding envelope came with a proviso: that council had to approve six-plexes. Unstated, but implicit: six-plexes everywhere in the city, not just downtown.
The current housing minister, Gregor Robertson, will be a softer touch because he has walked in mayor-sized shoes (in Vancouver), according to recent hot-takes. But that assumption, too, seems like a misreading of cabinet-PMO dynamics, which require ministers to delaminate themselves from prior allegiances to prevent accusations of stakeholder favoritism.
It’s possible, I suppose, that Chow’s bravado about that $30 million is rooted in insider knowledge; after all, she’s off on a major trade junket to the U.K. and Ireland this week and thus is presumably in the federal loop.
Yet there’s a bigger point to be made here — one that Chow, and indeed a majority of council, seem strangely oblivious to, which is the way in which their resistance to approving six-plexes city-wide played directly into the hands of federal politicians who have made a lot of hay with the gatekeeper narrative.
Obviously, that clique is led by the soon-to-be-Alberta-based Tory leader Pierre Poilievre and much of his caucus, including his housing/municipal affairs point person Scott Aitchison. They wanted to make federal infrastructure funding contingent on faster approvals and fewer municipal obstacles.
But when Sean Fraser stepped into the housing portfolio in 2023, the Liberals ingested and slightly re-purposed Poilievre’s talking point with their Housing Accelerator program, which consists mostly of carrot, but also more than the mere suggestion of stick.
Let’s also not forget that Carney promised to cut municipal development levies by 50%, and that pledge implicitly dangles the threat of reduced infrastructure transfers to municipalities that drag their feet when it comes to reducing such charges.
At council’s April meeting, Chow moved a motion to freeze development charges at their current levels (subject to various changes in provincial legislation). While Toronto council hasn’t budged on this issue, 905 municipalities like Vaughan and Mississauga have already slashed their DCs.
In sum, a bit more humility about our bargaining position would seem to be the most prudent stance, given the circumstances.
Chow has been roundly and correctly criticized for failing to push the six-plex proposal through council, either with persuasion or using her strong mayor powers. What strikes me most, however, is that everything that went down at that late June session — the over-indexed complaints from suburban councillors, the horse-trading by Gord Perks and Chow’s conspicuous silence — simply re-affirms the many criticisms of municipal government and its ponderous response to the housing affordability crisis.
The suburbs, we learned (again), are entitled to their entitlements, especially the right to take up a great deal of urban space at the expense of tens of thousands of Torontonians for whom a half-decent apartment, much less a house, has become simply too much to wish for.
These are the people whose voices Chow desperately needed to lift up, and yet she not only held her tongue but is counting on the fact that there will be no blow-back from a Liberal government that is asking — and not rhetorically — all Canadians to make tough choices.
Where were the tough choices in the six-plex debate? Allowing this kind of gentle density in those parts of the city where it already exists? Nope. The suburban councillors, who balk at these very modest reforms yet share the political ideology of federal pols who weren’t joking around when they targeted recalcitrant municipalities, aren’t making tough choices. They were defending turf using all the tired old pretext arguments — parking! set-backs! too many students! — that should have been shot out of the sky by a progressive, housing-oriented mayor.
Not because six-plexes will solve the affordability crisis, but rather on a critical point of principle, which is this: that the 70% of Toronto’s residentially-zoned land that has been off-limits to almost everything except detached homes for generations should no longer be treated, as a matter of public policy, like a massive gated community.
Chow had a chance to make this argument, but chose not to, perhaps emboldened by the presumption that the federal Liberals won’t notice or care. My feeling is that they did and they will. The mayor failed an important political test with flying colours. She should worry.
