>Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow believes that her city will suffer no consequences for reneging on an agreement with the federal government. The city was supposed to amend zoning rules to allow sixplexes as of right across the city in exchange for federal funding, and is refusing, but the mayor doesn’t think Ottawa will pull its subsidy. This despite the fact that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s first housing minister, Nate Erskine-Smith, already told the city that the federal government would claw back 25 per cent of roughly $120 million if the city didn’t approve the measure.
>”Look at me. Do I look worried?” Chow asked The Globe and Mail’s editorial board in a recent meeting, after city council nixed citywide sixplexes.
>”I don’t think there should be any clawback because our new housing minister has been a mayor and he would understand that it’s not that simple to push things through,” she said of Carney’s current housing minister, former Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson.
>”I would dare say we’re more ambitious than the federal government,” she added, bizarrely, of Toronto city council’s pathetic recent decision to allow sixplexes in only nine of 25 wards, after a council debate that made this very mundane form of housing sound like neighbourhood-despoiling blights requiring major infrastructure improvements. (The federal government is not in charge of municipal zoning.)
>”(Residents are) not satisfied with ramming through sixplexes in communities that were never designed to house them,” Coun. Stephen Hoyday moaned. Coun. Parthi Kandavel said he worried allowing sixplexes would drive up property values, which would “have a tremendous impact for working- and middle-class families on the path to home ownership.”
>I could fill a whole column responding to that. But suffice to say genuinely middle-class millennial and gen-Z Torontonians — as opposed to upper-class Torontonians who think of themselves as middle class — aren’t exactly riding a bullet train toward single-family-home ownership to begin with. Many would appreciate the opportunity to live, as owners or renters, in a comfy sixplex in one of Toronto’s famously leafy, un-dense single-family-home neighbourhoods, as opposed to in a soulless condo unit in a concrete forest.
>Councillors in wards still not allowing sixplexes as of right include New Democrats, Liberals, one of Chow’s deputy mayors, her budget chief, and the former head of the Toronto District School Board. Nominally progressive baby boomers’ chokehold on Toronto politics has weakened slightly in recent years, but “I got mine, what’s your problem?” still might as well be city council’s unofficial motto.
>[…]
>Chow’s approach is remarkably bold — much bolder than her attempts to strongarm council into approving sixplexes citywide, certainly. I’m not sure she realizes how bold it is.
>I claim no insight into Gregor Robertson’s thought processes. But if I were him, I would be properly hacked off at Chow. Robertson was not exactly universally hailed when he took over the file from his short-lived predecessor Erskine-Smith. “Former mayor of Vancouver” isn’t the sort of thing you expect to find on the CV of a federal housing minister dedicated to punching through the brick wall of protectionism, given the disastrous state of that city’s housing market. He hasn’t been very vocal since taking office. The biggest city in the country just stuck its thumb in his eye, and its mayor is acting like the chief pirate in Captain Phillips taking over the bridge.
>The money at stake (roughly $30 million) is piddling even compared to the City of Toronto’s budget, never mind the federal government’s. But if Robertson is worth anything as a housing minister, he has to make Erskine-Smith’s threat good. It took many years for the Trudeau Liberals to finally, utterly discredit their carbon tax — by exempting home heating oil, but not natural gas, and not even really pretending it was anything other than a sop to Atlantic Canada, where they needed votes.
>If Robertson and Carney let Toronto get away with this, they will be left with two options: Let every city get away with it, and thus abandon any reasonable claim to be seized with the housing issue; or go with a carbon-tax style double standard right off the bat. Either way they would look weak, unserious and ridiculous, and for what? It’s not as if Torontonians won’t vote Liberal anyway.
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>Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow believes that her city will suffer no consequences for reneging on an agreement with the federal government. The city was supposed to amend zoning rules to allow sixplexes as of right across the city in exchange for federal funding, and is refusing, but the mayor doesn’t think Ottawa will pull its subsidy. This despite the fact that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s first housing minister, Nate Erskine-Smith, already told the city that the federal government would claw back 25 per cent of roughly $120 million if the city didn’t approve the measure.
>”Look at me. Do I look worried?” Chow asked The Globe and Mail’s editorial board in a recent meeting, after city council nixed citywide sixplexes.
>”I don’t think there should be any clawback because our new housing minister has been a mayor and he would understand that it’s not that simple to push things through,” she said of Carney’s current housing minister, former Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson.
>”I would dare say we’re more ambitious than the federal government,” she added, bizarrely, of Toronto city council’s pathetic recent decision to allow sixplexes in only nine of 25 wards, after a council debate that made this very mundane form of housing sound like neighbourhood-despoiling blights requiring major infrastructure improvements. (The federal government is not in charge of municipal zoning.)
>”(Residents are) not satisfied with ramming through sixplexes in communities that were never designed to house them,” Coun. Stephen Hoyday moaned. Coun. Parthi Kandavel said he worried allowing sixplexes would drive up property values, which would “have a tremendous impact for working- and middle-class families on the path to home ownership.”
>I could fill a whole column responding to that. But suffice to say genuinely middle-class millennial and gen-Z Torontonians — as opposed to upper-class Torontonians who think of themselves as middle class — aren’t exactly riding a bullet train toward single-family-home ownership to begin with. Many would appreciate the opportunity to live, as owners or renters, in a comfy sixplex in one of Toronto’s famously leafy, un-dense single-family-home neighbourhoods, as opposed to in a soulless condo unit in a concrete forest.
>Councillors in wards still not allowing sixplexes as of right include New Democrats, Liberals, one of Chow’s deputy mayors, her budget chief, and the former head of the Toronto District School Board. Nominally progressive baby boomers’ chokehold on Toronto politics has weakened slightly in recent years, but “I got mine, what’s your problem?” still might as well be city council’s unofficial motto.
>[…]
>Chow’s approach is remarkably bold — much bolder than her attempts to strongarm council into approving sixplexes citywide, certainly. I’m not sure she realizes how bold it is.
>I claim no insight into Gregor Robertson’s thought processes. But if I were him, I would be properly hacked off at Chow. Robertson was not exactly universally hailed when he took over the file from his short-lived predecessor Erskine-Smith. “Former mayor of Vancouver” isn’t the sort of thing you expect to find on the CV of a federal housing minister dedicated to punching through the brick wall of protectionism, given the disastrous state of that city’s housing market. He hasn’t been very vocal since taking office. The biggest city in the country just stuck its thumb in his eye, and its mayor is acting like the chief pirate in Captain Phillips taking over the bridge.
>The money at stake (roughly $30 million) is piddling even compared to the City of Toronto’s budget, never mind the federal government’s. But if Robertson is worth anything as a housing minister, he has to make Erskine-Smith’s threat good. It took many years for the Trudeau Liberals to finally, utterly discredit their carbon tax — by exempting home heating oil, but not natural gas, and not even really pretending it was anything other than a sop to Atlantic Canada, where they needed votes.
>If Robertson and Carney let Toronto get away with this, they will be left with two options: Let every city get away with it, and thus abandon any reasonable claim to be seized with the housing issue; or go with a carbon-tax style double standard right off the bat. Either way they would look weak, unserious and ridiculous, and for what? It’s not as if Torontonians won’t vote Liberal anyway.
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