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Fighting for My Town: Looking Forward by Looking Back
We’ve lost ground in Toronto. Yes, we’ve made significant gains on a number of issues and in electing a progressive mayor and council. But the gauge that we used to determine what we are fighting for has shifted backwards over the last 20 years. We need to recognize this to move forward.
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Cities and Strategies for Progressive Politics
Today over 80 per cent of Canadians live in cities. Toronto, Montréal, greater Vancouver and the Calgary-Edmonton corridor are huge concentrations of people and economic activity. Nearly all of the 300,000 new Canadians who arrive every year choose to live in these regions, dramatically changing the demographics and diversity of our urban centres. Yet Canada’s constitution, set in 1867, gives no role or power to cities, keeping them instead as chattels of provincial governments. While it may seem that the “cities agenda” is about accessing the finances to maintain a full range of services under public control, it is actually about staking out the ground for the kind of society we want. In order to do that, we need to be able to connect with far more people than the Left has done in many years. This stark fact helps to explain why the labour movement must be at the centre of a “new urban politics.”
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Staging Queer Difference
Queer Pride organizing in Toronto has undergone a radical transformation. According to Gary Kinsman, a former Pride organizer and a Professor of Sociology at Laurentian University, early Pride events mixed pleasure with politics: “Pride Day was consciously used as a day to build a movement, a day to build community organizations and to get people involved in political campaigns.” In more recent years, however, Pride organizing reflects a very different set of priorities. While a number of political groups are still involved in the weeklong festival, and while many people derive a sense of community from the parade, Pride events are no longer organized to advance queer social movement politics. Pride planners, along with local officials and business elites, seem much more concerned with reorganizing the event to bolster the local tourist industry.
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Compete or Die
The campaign to make the city of Toronto competitive has been waged for more than a decade by supporters from across the political spectrum. Competitiveness, a catch-all term, is often measured by how many companies and tourists are lured here instead of Chicago or Cleveland or Charlotte. And there is a list of things a city like Toronto apparently needs to have in order to attract the big-spending tourists and investors looking for places to park their fortunes.
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