| Charlatan |
05-04-2011 08:26 PM |
Now that he has MPs elected in places like Toronto and Vancouver, will Harper continue to ignore the Urban centres?
Quote:
Hume: Note to city’s new Tories: Please give Harper a tour
By Christopher Hume Urban Issues, Architecture
Stephen Harper’s Canada does include cities, after all. He made that clear during his victory speech Monday night.
But his words revealed more about the state of Harper’s perception of cities than they did about the actual state of the nation’s cities.
“We will make our municipalities, regions and cities more equal,” he declared, flashing a rare grin. More equal than what he didn’t explain.
Then came the sentence that revealed so much. “We will pass comprehensive measures to reduce crime,” he pledged, “and make our streets and neighbourhoods safer.”
Safer than what he didn’t explain, either. But obviously, Harper has some catching up to do on the reality of life in Canadian cities. Yes, crime happens in urban centres, but the more important fact is that the numbers are down. Indeed, they have been dropping for years.
According to a recent Statistics Canada report, “Police-reported crime in Canada continues to decline. Both the volume and severity of police-reported crime fell in 2009, continuing the downward trend seen over the past decade.”
Those figures may not mesh with the Conservatives’ in-from-the-hinterland law-and-order agenda, but if you say something often enough, people start to believe it.
The Harperites have been fanning the flames of fear for years, finding enemies lurking on every corner. They have been threatening to crack down on criminals by increasing minimum jail terms, toughening parole requirements and, most famously, committing $2 billion to build more prisons.
Rather than celebrate the country’s declining crime rates — or even try to take credit for them — the Tories clearly decided their purposes are better served by ignoring the good news. Perhaps Harper’s logic was that if such a strategy worked in the U.S., it would work in Canada.
Of course, those who practise the politics of fear rely on a steady stream of villains to feed the outrage. What better place to look than downtown? Echoing the familiar refrains of North American anti-urban culture, Harper has joined the fight to keep our streets safe.
But if the Prime Minister takes time to listen to the newly elected members of his caucus who come from Canada’s big cities, he would discover that crime is well down the list of urban priorities. And after Monday’s vote, the Tories hold 29 of 44 seats in the GTA. The party also elected members in Vancouver as well as the usual Calgary and Edmonton, semi-cities both.
But in places such as Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, the big issues are transit, housing, chronic underfunding, lack of stable long-term revenues, decaying infrastructure … People do worry about crime, but Canada is not the U.S. Our cities aren’t Washington D.C., Detroit or New Orleans.
Still, the image of the city as dark, dangerous and diseased persists. It is built into the very structure of the country, ingrained in its institutional DNA and systems of governance. A body such as the Ontario Municipal Board, for instance, is based on the assumption that cities and the people who run them cannot be trusted.
This anti-urban prejudice has so permeated the political culture of Canada that Torontonians recently elected a mayor whose starting point is the same as Harper’s — namely, that the city is a problem that must be dealt with by government.
Though not known for his listening skills, Harper would be well advised to sit down with his urban colleagues to hear what they have to say about cities. They would remind him that far from being crime-ridden holes, Canadian cities routinely rank among the most liveable on Earth.
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