Copyright © 2016 Carlo Fanelli

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Editing: Jessica Antony

Cover design: John van der Woude

Printed and bound in Canada

Published by Fernwood Publishing

32 Oceanvista Lane, Black Point, Nova Scotia, B0J 1B0

and 748 Broadway Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3G 0X3

www.fernwoodpublishing.ca

Fernwood Publishing Company Limited gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Manitoba Department of Culture, Heritage and Tourism under the Manitoba Publishers Marketing Assistance Program and the Province of Manitoba, through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, for our publishing program. We are pleased to work in partnership with the Province of Nova Scotia to develop and promote our creative industries for the benefit of all Nova Scotians. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Fanelli, Carlo, 1984-, author

Megacity malaise: neoliberalism, public services and labour

in Toronto / Carlo Fanelli.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-55266-814-6 (paperback).—ISBN 978-1-55266-838-2 (epub).—

ISBN 978-1-55266-839-9 (kindle)

1. Municipal government—Ontario—Toronto. 2. Municipal services—

Ontario—Toronto—Management. 3. Industrial relations—Ontario—Toronto.

4. Neoliberalism—Ontario—Toronto. I. Title.

JS1789.3.A2F35 2016 320.8’509713541 C2015-908388-5

C2015-908389-3

Contents

Acknowledgements

1. The Anatomy of a Revenue Crisis

Toronto the Good?

2. Reshaping Municipal Governance, 1970–1994

Neoliberalism and Local Spaces of Accumulation

Precarity in the Workplace

Intergovernmental Administration in Ontario

3. Merger Mania and the Making of the Megacity, 1995–2005

Amalgamation and the Devolution Revolution

Toronto: Setting the Stage for Competitive Austerity

Early Confrontations: In the Shadow of Third Way Urbanism

4. Consolidating Municipal Neoliberalism, 2006–2011

Plus ça Change, Plus C’est la Même Chose

The Great Recession’s Urban Implications

Austerity-Lite: Collective Bargaining at City Hall

From Miller Time to Ford Nation: Austerity Urbanism Intensified

5. Concessionary Bargaining in Conservative Toronto, 2012–2014

Labour Strife: Union Negotiations in 2012

Municipal Labour’s Last Gasp or Comeback?

In Defence of the Public Sector: Some Thoughts on Strategy Moving Forward

6. Towards an Alternative Urban Agenda

Overcoming the Myth of Fiscal Crisis

Reimagining the Municipal Bargain

Rebuilding the Left: Inside and Outside of Organized Labour

The Old is Dying and the New Struggles to be Born

Afterword

New Mayor, Same Problems?

References

Index

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the support of many hands. I would like to thank Mark Thomas, Justin Paulson, Julia Barnett and Bryan Evans for sharing their keen insights, knowledge and support. I also want to thank Greg Albo and Sam Gindin for urging me to put pen to paper. I was a civic worker through the 2009 strike, and their visits to the picket lines and support rallies were a source of inspiration and encouragement. Greg and Sam carefully read numerous versions of articles and were always willing to share their encyclopedic breadth of information and experience. This book is dedicated to them. I also want to thank Wayne Antony for his immediate support of this project and sharp editorial eye. It is all the better for it. Many thanks to the friends, family and colleagues who offered their thoughts and advice on this project over the years. While too numerous to name, they all left a lasting influence on me and the ideas found here. Insightful comments by two anonymous reviewers significantly improved the arguments contained here. Needless to say, all of the opinions and views expressed here are the sole responsibility of the author. Finally, a special thank you to my parents and Samantha Wilson for their endless support and enthusiasm throughout.

Some of these chapters got their start as articles. This includes: “Neoliberal Urbanism and the Assault Against Public Services and Workers in Toronto, 2006–2011,” published in Articulo: Journal of Urban Research; “Toronto Civic Workers Bargaining Without a Base: The Significance of 2012,” in Studies in Social Justice; and “Under Pressure: How Public Policy is Constraining Ontario Municipalities” published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Ontario. They have all been thoroughly revised, re-written and expanded in the chapters that follow. To my former colleagues at the City of Toronto and in Canadian Union of Public Employees Locals 79 and 416: It is often said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. This book was written in the spirit of workers making their own history.

Chapter One

The Anatomy of a Revenue Crisis

This is a book about how public services and public sector workers have come under attack in an officially declared era of scarcity and fiscal retrenchment. As headquarters to the largest financial institutions and banks, as the largest municipal government and as the nation’s largest employment centre, Toronto is, in a sense, at the centre of urban neoliberalism in Canada. Canadian Union of Public Employees (cupe) Local 79 is also the largest municipal union in the country. Traditionally white- and pink-collar “inside” workers, Local 79 has a membership of 18,000, although various contingent, seasonal and part-time workers push its membership close to 24,000. Approximately 70 percent of Local 79’s members are women, with some 50 percent representative of historically racialized groups. Its sister union, Local 416, is primarily made up of blue-collar “outside” workers and has approximately 6,200 members. Together, they work in areas of public health and education, child and elder care, parks, recreation, water treatment, Emergency Medical Services, as well as housing and court services, road maintenance, by-law and safety enforcement, building inspection, animal rescue, waste collection and social services administration, just to name a few. Considering that Toronto has both the largest municipal government and largest municipal union in Canada, changes to Toronto’s public administration, services provisioning and labour-management relations may reveal trends in the broader public sector, as well as illustrate the forms of resistance and strengths as well as limitations of existing union capacities.

As a former municipal worker with the City of Toronto for nearly a decade, I was a member of cupe Local 79 during the ten-day work stoppage in 2000, the sixteen-day work stoppage in 2002 and a picket captain through the thirty-nine-day strike in 2009. I held many positions during my employment with Toronto Parks, Forestry and Recreation, including skating coordinator, pre-school and summer camp counselor and coordinator, seniors programmer, cooking instructor, fitness trainer, homework tutor, after-school caregiver and youth leadership development coordinator, as well as outreach and advocacy partner with community-based organizations. In this regard I have firsthand experience with an important segment of the services the City provides, not only as a worker and trade unionist, but also as a member of the community.

My connection to the City of Toronto is also a very personal one. I benefitted greatly from my local community centres in the borough of Rexdale — bedrock of “Ford Nation” (a reference to the predominantly suburban supporters of conservative Rob Ford). Rexdale is also one of the city’s “priority neighbourhoods” characterized by low incomes and high levels of workplace precarity, migration and health insecurity. Although concrete memories are now few and far between, my first experience as a user of the city’s services came at the tender age of four when I was enrolled in a daycare program at Thistletown Community Centre. Over the years I would go on to spend many evenings and whole summers participating in swimming lessons at the Elms Community Centre, hockey at Albion Arena and Sunnydale Acres Rink, basketball at Kingsview Village Community Centre, soccer at Summerlea Park, bocce with my grandfather at Gord and Irene Risk Community Centre, as well as woodworking, cooking and arts and crafts programming at Thistletown, to name just a few examples. Through these experiences a sense of friendship and community developed as I went to school with many of the same participants, visited the mom and pop shops of the neighbourhood, occasionally got to meet city councillors and school board trustees, and went to community events and festivals. By the age of fourteen I had become a volunteer and by sixteen was working in many of the community centres mentioned above. Thanks initially to the availability of public transit and later to parents who were brave enough to let their son borrow their vehicle, I was even able to work at other community centres throughout the city such as Islington and Glen Long Community Centres, Edenbridge Seniors Centre and many other seasonal locations. With all this in mind, I have a deep sense of gratitude for the public services and employment I was able to rely on, as well as profound concern as many of the opportunities that I benefitted from are steadily being eroded for others. Unaware to me at the time, I was being exposed to just a small fraction of the services cities provide: everything from pre-school to seniors’ programming, language instruction, healthcare support services, public transit, parks and road maintenance, waste disposal, police, fire and emergency medical services, urban planning, environmental initiatives and so on. This book, then, is as much a recognition of the community relationships and city services that impacted me as it is a scholarly contribution exploring the public institutions and governance arrangements, trade union rights and freedoms and public services that are threatened by elite-driven austerity measures and government policies that imperil urban life.

This book is grounded in a critical political economy approach that is informed by existing scholarly works, participant observation, data analysis of municipal budgets, Statistics Canada, labour and community reports, interviews and picket line conversations, as well as interactions with the users of public services and community members. This allowed me to carefully detail the social interactions and methods used by workers as they struggled to understand and respond to demands for concessions. At the heart of this book is a refutation of the City of Toronto’s fiscal crisis: I counter the argument that the City’s financial challenges stem from overgenerous wages or abuse from the users of public services. Rather, I begin with the spreading of urban neoliberalism across Ontario, and the City of Toronto in particular, demonstrating how the narrowly economistic rhetoric of fiscal crisis fails to consider the social, historical and politically motivated changes to intergovernmental financial transfers, labour-management relations and public services restructuring. The inability of Ontario municipalities to meet their revenue requirements stem not only from constitutional realities better suited to the nineteenth century than the urban realities of today, but especially from the neoliberal policies of tax cutting that have reduced fiscal capacities. In other words, the City of Toronto does not have a fiscal crisis, but a revenue crisis rooted in the constitutional constraints of municipal government and public policies of the neoliberal era.

As David Harvey (2009: 315–16) has argued: “From their inception, cities have arisen through geographical and social concentrations of a surplus product. Urbanization has always been, therefore, a class phenomenon, since surpluses are extracted from somewhere and from somebody, while the control over their disbursement typically lies in a few hands.” Pressures related to urbanization, then, extend beyond public administration and the management of urban-suburban development as these are rooted in the concrete forms of state and class power through which market-like rule is established. These pressures have undergone a swift intensification as what initially began as an unprecedented housing meltdown centred in the U.S. economy in the fall of 2007 quickly turned into a banking and financial market downturn, and later a global insolvency crisis through 2008. Due to the highly integrated nature of financial institutions and their exposure to toxic assets associated with the subprime housing market, including high levels of bank debt, what resulted over the course of 2007–08 was a series of forced bank mergers and quasi-nationalizations. These private sector bailouts by the public sector resulted in “troubled assets” being shifted onto the state sector or central banks, which also exposed other underlying problems such as financial malpractice and bank indebtedness, as well as longer-term issues related to overheated housing markets, credit-reliant consumption, stagnant real wages and wealth polarization. A worldwide credit crunch soon emerged as subprime mortgage-backed securities were discovered in the portfolios of banks and hedge funds around the world. The governments of the G8/G20 intervened with trillions in loans to guarantee inter-bank lending and the purchasing of government and commercial short-term loans (McNally 2011; Albo et al. 2010).

In an attempt to avoid a global depression, the governments of the G8/G20 met to coordinate the lowering of central bank-interest rates in order to stave off a feared turn to protectionism. Additional stimulative measures included temporary public works programs, particularly those related to infrastructure, as a means of injecting liquidity into the economy, and expanding consumption. Demonstrating their political affinity to neoliberalism, however, all G20 member governments agreed to further open their markets to capital, ensure credit availability and privatize public assets. Despite the most severe downturn since the Great Depression, public policy responses since the onset of the crisis have reinforced rather than undermined neoliberalism’s continuing ideological and policy dominance. In an unparalleled show of fiscal consolidation, policy responses have focused almost exclusively on deepening neoliberalism: service delivery restructuring, often in the form of contracting-out and public-private partnerships; further tax cuts, reducing social welfare provisions; seeking union concessions and worker layoffs; and increasing user fees backed by a massive privatization of public assets. In this regard, the toxic bank debt that triggered the crisis never went away, it was simply shifted onto governments, turning private debt into public debt. Thus the Great Recession provided a legitimating rationale for dismantling and privatizing public services and seeking worker, particularly union, concessions in what can otherwise be described as a period of permanent austerity. Although the 2008 economic uncertainty has amplified existing trends, it must also be considered over a much longer trajectory of municipal governance arrangements and pressures related to the specific socio-political and economic makeup of Toronto.

Surprisingly, however, there has been little written about the Great Recession’s urban and localized impacts, particularly in relation to labour struggles in the Canadian context. In conjunction with earlier eras of austerity and retrenchment federally and across the provinces, while the initial shock of the recession may have dissipated, it continues to have grave implications for the delivery and accessibility of social services, the working conditions of municipal employees and the social dimensions of urban and rural life more generally. Fears of a return to recession and lingering deficits continue to serve as a political pretext, justifying and intensifying the neoliberal reconfiguration of municipalities, in the process undermining free collective bargaining and increasing the scope of precarious work as a means of deceptive cost savings. This continues the assault against what vestiges remain of public services and quality employment that balances work-life conflicts and enhances community standards of living.

Toronto the Good?

In his 1898 book, Toronto the Good: A Social Study, C.S. Clark (1898: 1–3) wrote of Toronto:

One of the finest cities on the continent in point of beauty, wealth and intelligence … In point of morality the people of Toronto compare … with any other city quite favourably, and if the dark side of life is to be seen here, one may also witness the best … To a certain extent the people are liberal in matters of opinion, and as a rule men do not seek to influence the opinions of others except so far as they are privileged to do so.

Some fifty years later, the Baltimore Afro-American (Low 1948) wrote of “no restrictive covenants, segregation is practically unknown.” Whereas Toronto was once much lauded for its inclusiveness and sense of social justice, today the moniker Toronto the Good is used disparagingly to reflect a less than genuine sentiment. Indeed, Toronto, like Ontario and Canada more broadly, is experiencing wealth and income inequality of unprecedented magnitudes in the context of persisting race- and gender-based labour market segmentation (pepso 2014; Access Alliance 2013; Tjepkema, Wilkins and Long 2014). Following long-term trends, Canadian cities are today more socially stratified than ever before (Myles, Picot and Piper 2000; Walks 2013). In Canada’s three largest cities the bottom 90 percent of income-earners made less in 2013 than they did in 1983. In Ontario, the richest 1 percent of wealthy individuals earned sixteen times more than the average Ontarian, while the wealthiest 1 percent of Torontonians earned twenty-three times the average Toronto resident. Youth unemployment in Toronto as of 2014 is in excess of 20 percent, while racialized youth, immigrants and women are at an even greater disadvantage (Root et al. 2014; Roy et al. 2014; Wellesley Institute 2014). It is in this context that Toronto municipal workers have been under pressure to forfeit concessions at the expense of market discipline.

Chapter 2 provides a brief overview of the making and remaking of municipal governance in Ontario over the post-war period. It begins with a theoretical analysis of neoliberalism at the urban and regional scale, drawing attention to workplace precarity in the context of intersecting axes of oppression (for example, race, class and gender). Toronto proper as it exists today is a product of the late 1990s. However, from 1954 to 1998 the municipality of metropolitan Toronto served as a senior regional level of government together with six lower-tier constituencies. Because municipalities were never regarded as sovereign political entities, this chapter briefly summarizes intergovernmental administration within the context of federal and provincial devolution. Over this period, municipalities became critical nodal points as territorial and institutional arrangements evolved within historically and locally specific contexts. As a result of decreasing transfers to municipalities, a number of government-initiated reports explored the expansion of local revenue-raising capacities at the local level. However, in the absence of extending new revenue tools, municipalities remained dependent on senior levels of administration. By the early 1990s, Ontario’s political economic climate had changed dramatically as the context of recession and austerity proved fatal to the provincial New Democratic government. This in part set the stage for the election of the Progressive Conservatives, which advanced the neoliberal agenda to new heights as regional governments, townships and cities were unilaterally amalgamated and restructured.

Chapter 3 begins with the hard-right shift of the Ontario political economy. Before the end of the decade, the Progressive Conservatives would enact ninety-nine different tax cuts, eroding more than $1 billion in transfers to Ontario municipalities and significantly increasing local fiscal pressures. When the Harris Government came into office there were 815 municipalities and 1,900 school board trustees. By the end of the Conservatives’ term, this number had been reduced to 447 municipalities and 700 school board trustees. This included a massive devolution of program spending and responsibilities onto municipalities without matching fiscal supports. Similar retrenchment was occurring federally over this period as the elimination of the Canada Assistance Plan, reductions to federal-provincial transfers and the unilateral devolution of social welfare responsibility not only cut and decentralized federal funding, but also eroded national enforcement standards. Despite some modest investments in municipal funding during the briefly Paul Martin-led federal government, both provincial and federal transfers to municipalities over this period remained ad hoc and uncoordinated. At the municipal scale, Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman (1998–2003) used the reduction in federal and provincial transfer funds to municipalities as a political rationale to increase workplace precarity amid attempts to privatize city services and assets. This set the stage for competitive austerity in Toronto: the quest to make labour more “flexible,” strengthen workplace discipline, reduce public services and enhance competitiveness in the “global city.”

Chapter 4 begins with an assessment of three new governing administrations: the Harper Conservatives federally, McGuinty Liberals provincially and Miller Administration at Toronto City Hall. Consistent with the long-term retreat of federal involvement in municipal issues, the federal Conservatives showed limited interest in moving beyond piecemeal injections of municipal funds, further devolving itself of municipal responsibility. In a similar vein, although the provincial Liberals took steps toward rectifying some of the significant cuts to municipal transfers undertaken throughout the Harris era, re-engagement still failed to counteract some three decades of declining investments. Instead of addressing the structural deficit at the root of Ontario municipalities’ fiscal woes, the Liberals continued the aggressive austerity initiatives that had been a hallmark of the Harris government.

During what would become the longest strike of the post-amalgamation era in Toronto, rather than depart from the neoliberal project of the Lastman era, Mayor David Miller (2003–2010) essentially conceded to the neoliberal agenda using the 2008 global economic downturn to justify concessionary demands, pitting the availability of municipal services upon wage restraint by city workers. Given the strategic location of Toronto as the centre of financial capital in Canada and home to Canada’s largest municipal union, the 2009 round of bargaining served as a litmus test or blueprint of sorts as the state sought to privatize public services at the behest of capital. Although the 2009 civic workers’ strike managed to achieve some minor increases in economic compensation, it was a significant political failure in its inability to draw connections between the attacks against public services and workers to tax shifting for competitiveness and chronic underfunding. Few connections were made between the defence of public sector workers and services and their relationship to the users of those services. These concerns could have been framed as a clear political message arguing in favour of decent working conditions for all. Moreover, Local 79 was unprepared to respond to the City’s demands for concessions along with limited community support and solidarity

While some of Local 79’s weaknesses stem from organizational failings, they are also related to larger questions of rank-and-file engagement in relation to executive-led mandates, as well as Toronto’s historically fragmented labour and community movements. Little was done to facilitate membership educational initiatives, build independent organizational capacities or foster a sense of collective unity. In the absence of an oppositional political program, Local 79 and its sister union, Local 416, were incapable of countering the drumbeats of austerity and retrenchment. As such, the 2009 strike was both a leadership and an organizational failure. It also formed part of the backdrop leading to the election of a conservative mayor, Rob Ford (2010–2014), and a council that vowed to strip the city’s unions of their benefits, privatize services and assets and increase worker discipline. Despite the significance of 2009, Local 79 was unprepared for future negotiations.

Chapter 5 departs from this context. As austerity measures continued federally and provincially, the Ford administration at Toronto City Hall redoubled its efforts to privatize public services and extract wage and benefit concessions. Unlike the 2009 round of bargaining that ended in debacle for both Locals 79 and 416 and the City, the 2012 round of collective bargaining did not result in a strike. It did, however, result in a catalogue of concessions, including the strengthening of managerial prerogatives over shifts and scheduling, the removal of protections against technological displacement and contracting-out, and the elimination of health, dental and post-retirement benefits. Although variegated, the shared political agenda from Lastman to Miller and Ford shows that, once in power, each of these administrations sought to further discipline workers to the imperatives of capital amidst a hardening of neoliberalism and the state. This suggests that if unions are to reappear as a movement and not simply hang on as a relic of the past, they will need to move beyond the limited defence of their own members’ interests and to those of labour and community activists as a whole.

With this in mind, Chapter 6 starts with the premise that a new municipal and regional agenda infused with social justice values is necessary. In order to implement such a program, it is necessary to overcome the prevailing myth of fiscal crisis. Alternative approaches to public policy must be rooted in alternative political visions that challenge the continued reliance on tax cuts as a cure for nearly all of society’s social ills and municipal governance that rejects the market-based remaking of urban life. This will require both new federal and provincial investments in municipalities, as well as new local revenue-raising capacities and governance powers. The current municipal reliance on property taxes as the major source of revenue is unsustainable in the long run and merely shifts the burden of social and physical infrastructure away from capital and onto labour, as well as onto future generations.

Of course, geography matters, so conferring new powers to municipal councils still requires forming new urban planning arrangements with other levels of government and community actors. Local governance, it seems, is at a standstill, caught between the dead-end of neoliberal urbanism and struggles to envision a local political economy rooted in workplace democracy and social justice. In this sense, the old is dying as the new struggles to be born. But how to advance such a political program?

It is not, of course, just a matter of more union density but a question of reinvention and overcoming the limits of sectionalism. Unions in any form are alone capable of resisting the coordinated push for austerity and hardening of neoliberalism. Doing so requires having feet both inside and outside the trade union movement rooted in an organizational form explicitly intent on creating a broader working-class movement across its many cleavages. This requires working to build the capacities of the entire union to fight back against concessionary demands, developing a movement inside the union that pushes for enhanced democratic participation and control, a radically feminist, anti-racist, class struggle-oriented politics that engages with the struggles of the broader community, and educational efforts intent on building a cadre of workers and activists that embodies both intellectual understanding and engagement. In other words, there needs to be a class-infused alternative — left of social democracy — that is critical of neoliberal capitalism and informed by socialist and other radical ideas and values. In light of mounting demands for concessions, it is becoming increasingly clear that unions and oppressed persons generally can no longer, if they ever could, put their faith in the courts, laws or governments to enforce what vestiges remain of the post-war class compromise. For some three decades, labour and community activists have been unable to stop, let alone reverse, the progressive dismantlement of social programs and public services amidst an increasingly militant and recalcitrant state and capitalist class offensive. The attacks against the collective bargaining rights of municipal workers, then, should unmistakably be understood as acts of class war. The initiatives undertaken by civic workers in future rounds of bargaining will determine to what extent the union is able to withstand demands for concessions, what new forms of grassroots and community involvement will look like and in what sense rank-and-file workers will press for greater accountability and involvement. If the offensive is to be fundamentally countered, a revived working-class politics must rekindle the struggle for realizing an alternative vision of sub/urban and rural life rooted in enhancing democratic capacities and social inclusion.

This book is intended for scholars and researchers concerned with new theoretical and empirical contributions to urban public policy, labour-management relations, the legal and constitutional contexts of city governments relative to other levels of government and the policy instruments used to address budget challenges. It is also written for undergraduate and graduate students in sociology, labour studies, politics, urban and regional studies and geography, as well as policymakers, think-tank, labour and community researchers interested in federal and provincial policy at the municipal sphere, collective bargaining, social services restructuring and attempts to fashion a different kind of city.

Chapter Two

Reshaping Municipal Governance, 1970–1994

In both practice and political ideology, neoliberalism is many-sided, including a broad set of macroeconomic policies, a worldview and an approach to public policy. Neoliberalism’s intellectual roots can be found in the classical liberalism and the economic writing of Von Mises, Hayek and Friedman (Peck 2010; Stedman Jones 2012). Although an offspring of the Great Depression, the Keynesian crisis of the 1970s reignited latent class antagonisms culminating in the three-decades-long struggle for neoliberal hegemony. Neoliberalism’s most vocal expositors took a long-established core of liberal values and refashioned them into a new form. In this sense, the intellectual inspiration and policy developments of neoliberalism have been multi-dimensional, variegated and heterogeneous in different jurisdictions and at different times. In other words, neoliberalism can be understood as the latest set of social, spatial and institutional configurations in the ongoing development of capitalism, which is composed of conflicting tendencies toward destruction and creation (Brenner and Theodore 2002a). This dynamic has been particularly noted at the local sphere in relation to intersecting scales of class struggles.

Neoliberalism and Local Spaces of Accumulation

Emerging in the economic downturn of the 1970s, neoliberal policies focused on wide-ranging transformations in economic policy, democratic structures and the organization of work and deepening inequalities of class, race and gender as equity-seeking policies fell to the wayside. In this regard, neoliberalism can be broadly understood as a political project seeking to reconstitute class power through re-establishing the political conditions conducive to capitalist accumulation. Considered historically and internationally, the military junta of Pinochet in Chile and the elections of Thatcher in the U.K., Regan in the U.S. and Mulroney in Canada are key moments in the making of a neoliberal policy bloc. In this regard, the multi-scalar state has in some instances led, and at other times created the conditions for capital to lead in the neoliberal restructuring of the global political economy (Albo et al. 1993; Azoulay 2000; Brenner and Keil 2006).

As a political project, neoliberalism has been characterized by a capitalist class and state offensive in which the aim has been to rescind the collective gains made by labour in the quarter-century following World War II, while at the same time extending new forms of commodification (Brenner and Theodore 2002b; Peck and Tickell 2002; Dumenil and Levy 2001). Understood this way, neoliberalism is a politically guided, yet frequently contested, process seeking to alter the balance of class forces in favour of capital at the expense of labour. This restructuring has had especially harmful consequences for the provisioning of public services, the workers delivering those services and the users of those services. At the root of this restructuring is a socio-spatial, historical and political process seeking to extend and deepen the relationship between the state and the market. Understood this way, neoliberalism is not a juxtaposition of (less) state against (more) market, but rather about a particular kind of state suited to the logic of capital in a specific historical phase of capitalist development. This has included reducing public services and assets in order to open up the state sector to new profit-making opportunities; lowering wages, benefits and working conditions for a more flexible and market-dependent workforce; and deploying the coercive apparatuses of the state to enforce these market mechanisms.

Proponents of neoliberalism maintained that states ought to be limited to securing the institutional preconditions for a competitive market and, once established, remolding state practices in order to ensure market-like rule. In this sense, states were to be limited to the protection of private property, security, national defence and the legal enforcement of contracts so as to not interfere with so-called market forces. As a social paradigm and policy framework, central to neoliberalism has been the abandonment of full employment, national economic development and a shift from collective to individual culpability (Workman 2009; Duffy et al. 1997). This includes limiting wage increases to below increases in productivity, the systemic use of state power to impose market imperatives and create new spaces for accumulation, inflation targeting by the central bank, regressive tax reforms, the erosion and dismantlement of social services and the encouragement of foreign direct investment and trade liberalization.

However, neoliberalism is not a one-dimensional policy bloc but a variegated process that has also reconstructed administrative relationships and responsibilities between levels of government in order to embed market rule. The restructuring of regulatory frameworks and governance arrangements have reshaped the contours of institutional landscapes and rewoven interconnections among them. The subsequent tendency has been to limit the scope of (sub)national discretion along market lines. This has entailed the concurrent introduction of new state supports and mechanisms that facilitate private accumulation, as well as the retrenchment of social programs provided by the state. Thus restructuring has entailed the simultaneous devolution and upwards transference of regulatory responsibilities to other tiers of government, often without matching fiscal supports or regulatory decision-making powers. This fluid process of realigning political institutions prevents any one scale of government from using their regulatory authority to erect trade barriers against the goods and services from other political units, thereby entrenching capital mobility and avoiding any centralization or harmonization of market-inhibiting policies (Harmes 2006). In other words, this process can be understood as locking in inter-jurisdictional competition, with the aim being to marketize and commodify all spheres of social life.

Precarity in the Workplace

In an effort to reduce service costs, many public sector employers, like their private sector counterparts, have adopted a neoliberal approach to employment that is achieved through the temporary and discretional use of layoffs, labour intensification, the denial of benefits and retrenchment of wages. This has included curtailing free collective bargaining rights, management strategies that promote multi-skilling, continuous re-training, performance-based pay, tightly controlled managerial practices and enhanced workplace supervision (Camfield 2011; Evans 2013; Panitch and Swartz 2003). Feminist and anti-racist political economists have identified key dimensions of neoliberal policies that often go unaccounted for in analyses that neglect racial- and gender-based oppressions. For instance, in the context of persisting gendered and racialized divisions of labour, the reduction and privatization of social services have increased both the demands on women’s responsibilities in the home and exacerbated low-wage occupational job segregation (Braedley and Luxton 2010; Jenson and Sineau 2001; Pupo and Thomas 2010). From the reduction of child and elder care services to ongoing workplace-based segregation, the broad policy matrixes of neoliberalism have further reinforced Canada’s gender- and colour-coded labour market (Block and Galabuzi 2011; Bezanson and Luxton 2006).

This is especially pertinent to women and racialized groups in the public and para-public sectors, where they have made the most gains and where labour market segmentation is less pronounced in comparison with similar private sector work (Baines 2013; Briskin 2013; Pupo and Noack 2010; Warskett 2013). As neoliberal policies are ingrained across the public sector, gendered and racialized labour market inequities are further sharpened as weakened labour market and income security protections worsen historical patterns of exclusion. This is reflected, for example, in women’s and racialized groups’ over-representation across low-income occupations as well as in higher rates of poverty (Galabuzi 2006; Lewchuk, Clarke and De Wolff 2011; Creese 2007). Thus, as ethno-racial and gender-based inequalities — rooted in fundamentally antagonistic class relations — are further intensified through the marketization of public services, the burden increasingly falls on historically racialized groups, women and (im)migrants to occupy the most precarious labour market positions. In the alleged absence of market failure, the principle of individual failure has come to dominate public policy debates as policymaking in the broad public interest has increasingly faded from view. With the dissolution of the Keynesian male-income-earner model, the neoliberal employment relationship is one characterized by increasingly insecure labour market arrangements, low pay, the absence of benefits or entitlements and growing work-life imbalances (Vosko 2006).

Recent scholarship regarding the growing spread of precarious work is also revealing new insights. Lewchuck et al. (2011) propose that the labour market may be in the midst of a major shift. Their data suggests that men’s and women’s employment experiences are becoming increasingly similar. However, for the most part, this is not due to the improvement of women’s employment opportunities and wages, but the result of the general downward convergence of wages and working conditions across the labour market. In other words, disparities typically associated with “feminized labour” are being replaced by dual precarious-earner households. As they argue, “White male workers can no longer assume that secure labour market positions are theirs, while new opportunities for hidden forms of both gender and racial privileging/discrimination have merged in the less secure segments of the labour market, in the pay differences, constant scheduling, and rehiring/firing of temporary and contingent work” (Lewchuk et al. 2011: 94). As a means of rationalizing the elimination of public services and deteriorating working conditions, proponents of neoliberalism have promoted tax cuts as a cure for nearly all of society’s social ills. As a consequence, to borrow a phrase from Marx, tax cuts have become the new opiate of the masses. Such changes in the nature and content of public policy have had significant implications for labour market conditions as the generally inferior working conditions and wages of the private sector have become the new benchmark, which, in the process, has provided legitimation for attacking public sector workers’ wages and working conditions.

The ongoing transformation of the public sector via policy prescriptions expounding the virtues of neoliberalism have perhaps been most apparent with the growth of new public management (npm) theories that have sought to “modernize” the public sector through alleged efficiency-generating principles based on private sector management models. By increasing market exposure, proponents of npm advocate a transition from public administration to public management via the privatization of public goods and services, a greater reliance on outsourcing, contracting-out and user pay provisions. Competition between public agencies and private firms is claimed to increase cost-effectiveness, while the use of short-term and contract labour, including performance-related pay and bonuses, is envisaged as constructing a “lean” state (Sears 1999). npm theories, like the overarching neoliberal framework in which they are embedded, seek to enhance capital accumulation by limiting trade unions’ rights and freedoms, privatizing public services and employment, and establishing the generally inferior private sector labour practices in the public sector. This restructuring has had particularly deleterious effects on racialized groups and women across scales of the state as both the quality of work and the mental well-being of workers have declined (McDonough, Worts, Fox and Dmitrienk 2008; Worts, Fox and McDonough 2007; Baines 2004).

Municipalities have become critical nodal points as territorial–institutional arrangements evolve within historically and locally specific capitalist contexts (Peck 2010). New fiscal constraints upon municipalities from national and provincial spending cuts, for example, have intensified competitive pressures and demands for austerity. As will be discussed below, even though the fiscal capacities of Canadian and especially Ontario municipalities to generate revenue are weak, they are often left to provide public services formerly provided by other tiers of government, such as social and physical infrastructure, environmental initiatives and community services. As such, municipal governments, especially in larger cities, have often borne the brunt of neoliberal restructuring and efforts to re-assert the power base of the capitalist classes. Just as capital rules over labour, this has resulted in municipalities having responsibility without power, while other tiers of government continue to have power without responsibility.

In this regard, local public policy increasingly promotes conditions favourable to accumulation by capital(ists), irrespective of the social costs. These policies include cost-cutting measures aimed at so-called administrative efficiencies, reductions to public services, state subsidies to private capital and attacks on public sector unions. Local states thus create new spaces for privatization, interlocal and regional entrepreneurialism and competition (Leitner and Sheppard 1998). Jamie Peck and his colleagues argue:

Cities … are not merely at the “receiving end” of neoliberalization processes, imposed unilaterally from above. Even in a context in which few cities are able to exert controlling influence over the trajectory of regulatory change, processes of neoliberalization continue to be actively constituted (and contested) across a planetary system of urban(izing) regions. (Peck, Theodore and Brenner 2013: 1093)

Urban neoliberalism, then, can be understood as an uneven process of political economic restructuring in a matrix of multi-scalar institutional relationships and labour–capital conflicts; as an urban policy regime promoting local processes of marketization, public sector austerity and flexibilization of work relations; and as a process of internationalizing the local economy. It is in the context of an increasingly urbanized planet that cities and wider metropolitan regions have become pivotal sites for, on the one hand, the extension of neoliberal projects and, on the other hand, sites of contestation. Yet, cities are much more than merely ideological and institutional experiments of neoliberalism. They are also important sites for mass rebellion and collective action, wherein a range of organizing, labour militancy and alternative visions for urban life may be developed, challenging the narrow policy parameters of neoliberalism as well as the structural constraints of capitalism (Brenner and Theodore 2012b; Harvey 2013, 2005). The politics of austerity and policy practices since the Great Recession, then, should be understood as a class strategy that takes further steps toward the “total privatization” of the public sector (Albo and Fanelli 2014).

In Canada, there are some important differences to note between how neoliberalism has affected private- and public-sector work. Whereas casualization in the private sector has been mainly in long-term, part-time work, it has taken place primarily though temporary full-time employment in the public sector. Thus, in the public sector, short-term, full-time work has eclipsed permanent part-time employment as the main form of casualized labour. Given significant structural forms of discrimination, such as those historically linked to the gender wage gap and racialized exclusions, transformations in the quality and form of public sector work and working conditions remain important given that nearly one in five Canadians, 61 percent of whom are women, work in the public sector (Stinson 2010).

The public sector remains a crucial, albeit increasingly insecure and fragile, stronghold of Canadian trade unionism (Ross and Savage 2013; Panitch and Swartz 2003). It is this very strength and potential that helps explain why public sector workers and their unions have come under such political and economic consternation from across the political spectrum. Because municipal “corporations,” as they are formally called, were never regarded as sovereign political entities, municipal labour relations fall under general or private sector labour relations statutes under provincial law. Furthermore, given public sector workers’ concentration in urban centres and their strategic location as the providers of a broad range of services, they are in a unique position to build deeply integrated labour-community alliances fighting for the pursuit of social justice and expanded public services (Brenner and Theodore 2005; Harvey 2009; Turner and Cornfield 2007). Workers employed by municipal governments are in a distinctive position to build popular political support, since municipal services are typically provided and consumed in a shared geographic region. In many cases, these workers provide essential services to others in the city, but are often also the users of those services. Thus, there is a greater potential to build solidarity in the struggle to defend and transform the provision and governance of public services because they appeal more directly to people’s everyday lives.

As will be shown in the chapters that follow, it is in this context that the City of Toronto sought to deepen and extend market imperatives at the expense of public services and workers by cheapening labour and making paid employment more precarious. This has also meant an emboldened attempt to privatize and commoditize public services and assets as local governments implement broad programs of “austerity urbanism” (Peck 2012, 2013), driving a fiscal crisis at the urban scale. Municipal fiscal crises have been a recurring feature of Canadian, particularly Ontario, urbanism for some three decades as fiscal capacities could not keep up with increased pressures for service demands and urbanization. This process has escalated over the past decade as tax-shifting for competitiveness and reductions to social services, including the lingering effects of the Great Recession, have combined to intensify neoliberal urbanism (Boudreau, Keil and Young 2009; Hackworth 2007, 2008).

Intergovernmental Administration in Ontario

Arrangements governing provincial–municipal relations in Ontario are rooted in the Baldwin Act of 1849, which established the statutory terms of the relationship and the British North America Act of 1867, and later the Constitution Act 1982, which determined the distribution of federal and provincial powers and responsibilities. Although judicial interpretation would later weaken the strong federated model that the authors of confederation had envisaged (McBride and Shields 1997), under Section 92(8) of the Canadian Constitution municipalities are essentially “creatures” of provincial governments as they can create, modify or eliminate a local government at will (Dewing et al. 2006). Provincial governments also determine which powers a local government is entitled or responsible to execute. Ontario has one of the most decentralized provincial–municipal structures in the country. Municipalities consist of cities, towns, villages, townships and, in southern Ontario, regions, counties and districts, which are upper-tier municipalities on whose councils sit members of lower-tier units located within its boundaries, except for cities and some towns. Upper-tier municipalities include regions, counties and districts and are headed by a chair or warden, while lower-tier municipalities are headed by a mayor or reeve. The largest single-tier cities are chaired by a mayor.

Toronto proper as it exists today is a product of the late 1990s. The city has a rich history of phases of growth, amalgamation and annexation, along with specific geographical and political economic developments. Prior to 1953, “old” Toronto was surrounded by twelve municipalities that had been growing rapidly following WWII. Given land supply constraints and a growing population, much of the suburban growth was accommodating single-family dwellings. This placed a significant amount of pressure on small, outlying municipalities for local services such as water and sewage disposal, roads, electrical transmission, lighting and schools. Without the tax base to support new demands for social and physical infrastructure, owing largely to their residential makeup, many faced financial difficulties expanding public services over the post-war period.

Toronto proper, on the other hand, with a growing commercial and industrial base and which had displaced Montreal as the largest Canadian urban centre, was able to expand both public services and crucial physical infrastructure (Caulfield 1994, 2010). Despite some occasional cooperation, however, each municipality essentially acted alone in policy and planning regarding land use, transit, housing, services provisioning and infrastructure. As a result, coupled with the absence of administrative capacities for then-suburban municipalities and, in some cases, uncoordinated duplication of services and infrastructure inputs, in 1954 the Province passed legislation in an attempt to address these issues on a regional basis. This measure was internationally commended by academics, think-tanks, governments and pundits for its foresight to address issues on a regional scale, while at the same time recognizing local circumstances (Friskin 1993).

The Metropolitan Toronto Act established a two-tier order: a senior (Metropolitan) regional level and thirteen lower-tier municipalities. While regional-level governance concerned itself with transit and roads and long-term land use planning, borrowing and assessment, lower-tier municipalities concerned themselves with more immediate community-oriented services such as fire and waste disposal, licensing and public health standards, recreation, policing, emergency medical services, electrical distribution and social welfare assistance. In some instances, regional and lower-tier governments integrated land use planning, transportation infrastructure, sewage and wastewater, although the “old” City of Toronto picked up more than 60 percent of the costs of regional development. The idea was that as suburban municipalities expanded their property tax base, Toronto proper’s burden would decrease as other municipalities would then be able to expand their networks of services and infrastructure in a coordinated way. Thus at the heart of this two-tier structure was a redistributive element.

Over this period, Ontario municipal workers’ associations, by and large subject to the provisions of general labour relations statutes, were historically among the most militant public sector workers. Beginning in the early 1900s, the burgeoning public works and utilities sectors, hydro-electric generation, transit and correctional facilities workers were demanding the right to organize and bargain (Frankel and Pratt 1954). Because municipal corporations fell under general or “private” sector labour relations statues, they played a central role in contributing to the eventual breakthrough of public sector labour relations statutes recognizing the right to strike and bargain collectively, first federally and later provincially for broader public sector workers in the 1940s, which was then strengthened through the late 1960s and early 1970s (Panitch and Swartz 2003). Local unions often injected some radicalizing influences to broader struggles across provincial and federal public sectors. This also implicitly compelled provincial public sector workers in Ontario, particularly those with the Civil Service Association of Ontario (a precursor to the Ontario Public Service Employees Union), to take a more militant posture, albeit unevenly, at the local level given the aggressive organizing drives by the National Union of Public Employees and the National Union of Public Service Employees (the predecessors to cupe) (Roberts 1994).

Through the 1960s, Metropolitan Toronto government assumed responsibility over social assistance, traffic and roads, as well as emergency medical services, waste disposal, conservation and licensing. On the basis of a provincial commission, in 1967 the seven smallest municipalities of Metropolitan Toronto were merged with their larger counterparts, which resulted in a six-municipality reconfiguration. From 1967 to 1998, the municipality of Metropolitan Toronto served as a senior regional level of government together with six lower-tier jurisdictions (Etobicoke, East York, York, North York, Scarborough and “old” Toronto). The two-tier governance arrangement proved very successful in pooling resources as physical infrastructure (for example, water and sewage, highways and transit) and public services (for example, homes for the aged and parks and recreation) expanded. By the 1970s, the provincial government had assumed responsibility for court and justice services administration, as well as property assessments. However, by this point the former suburbs had been largely integrated as a result of urban sprawl and their inability to accommodate new growth. As a result, the Province created four new two-tier regional governments in the Greater Toronto Area (York, Halton, Peel and Durham) in order to expand services delivery and meet new demands for infrastructure. These new pressures also resulted in a number of labour confrontations as municipal public sector workers sought to defend their gains at the negotiating table, as well as preserve community access to existing services and extend them to new areas. For instance, in 1980–81 roughly ten thousand healthcare workers at fifty Ontario hospitals organized by cupe struck in defiance of mandated arbitration and laws prohibiting strikes by hospital employees. Demonstrative of the turn to state coercion at the provincial level, the strike was ended one week later and was met with severe reprisals by the government: thirty-four workers were fired, 3,400 were suspended and three union leaders, including cupe president Grace Hartman, were jailed for contempt of court for supporting striking workers. Later that year, eleven thousand striking hospital workers at Riverdale Hospital organized with cupe were legislated back to work, which resulted in strikers being charged with contempt of court and the union charged with criminal contempt and fined $250,000 (Pierson and Cohen 1995). Like mounting labour struggles more generally, it was becoming increasingly clear that federal and provincial pressures would play a significant factor in the remaking of urban and regional governance, especially as neoliberalism gained ideological momentum in policymaking practices across scales of the state.

Starting in the mid-1970s (and then exploding in the 1990s), provincial and federal governments sought to “solve” their own budgetary impasses by shifting the cost of social and physical infrastructure downward onto other tiers of government and/or individuals. Although the federal government has no constitutionally prescribed municipal powers, all of its decisions affect municipalities in one way or another. However, except for some grants, bilateral agreements and emergency relief, the federal role in municipal affairs over the last forty years has revolved around ad hoc agreements. Unlike most other member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the G7, there is a complete absence in Canada of a national policy for cities or for municipal funding of crucial infrastructure, transportation, housing, immigration and poverty alleviation.

For a brief period of time, from 1971–79, the federal government had a Ministry of State for Urban Affairs (msua), a landmark attempt to institutionalize federal–municipal relations (Spicer 2011, 2012). The Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau even expressed a willingness to recognize municipalities constitutionally. But as cooperative federalism gave way to contested federalism in the 1980s and the provinces expressed opposition to both federal “intrusion” in policymaking and constitutional recognition of municipalities, the federal government essentially abandoned urban and regional policy reform and returned to makeshift local agreements. This was particularly the case as neoliberalism gained ideological and political momentum in the new right movements of the 1980s, most vividly captured by the Reform and Canadian Alliance Parties in western Canada (Laycock 2002; Carroll and Ratner 2005).

Unlike the federal and provincial scales of administration, Ontario municipalities generally do not have the power to implement a broad range of tax measures such as income, corporate, sales, resource and import taxes. Municipalities are also limited in their ability to incur debt. For example, an Ontario municipality may issue long-term debt only if it is used for capital purposes but cannot borrow for operations, except by issuing promissory notes that require they be repaid when the current tax levy is received. Other levels of government are able to refinance their debt when it matures and engage in long-term deficit management with respect to fiscal capacity. But, for municipalities, the principal must be amortized over the term of the debenture or bond and repaid to investors or contributions made to a sinking fund that will provide for repayment when the debt matures.

Thus, Ontario municipalities rely overwhelmingly on property taxes to raise revenue outside of federal and provincial transfers. And from this they must provide for general government administration, social assistance and health services, social housing, fire, policing and so forth. As a result of dwindling transfers to municipalities, the 1990s saw renewed calls for greater federal involvement in municipal affairs, particularly that related to revenue transfer. This resulted in the establishment of the Canada Infrastructure Works Program in 1993, which provided $2.5 billion over five years for local services and infrastructure. Unlike the msua, however, the federal government’s role would be limited to providing occasional fiscal injections rather than dedicated, long-term revenue streams.

Although Ontario had long been a province dominated by Progressive Conservative rule, by the mid-1980s Ontario had been transformed into an urbanized manufacturing and service economy in the south and a service and extraction-based economy centred on the mineral and forest sectors in the north (MacDermid and Albo 2001). Although real growth in Ontario had exceeded 4 percent per year from 1984 to 1989 (the largest and most sustained since the 1960s), federal cuts to shared-cost arrangements made themselves felt on Ontario’s fiscal balance sheet. By the late 1980s, the David Peterson-led Liberals were making the case that federal downloading had resulted in over $1 billion in lost revenue. In an attempt to partially offset eroding revenues, the Liberals raised a broad range of consumption taxes on gasoline, tobacco, alcohol and general retail sales. Like the federal government, which reduced corporate and personal income taxes in the late 1980s, the Ontario Liberals followed suit, lowering capital taxes and reducing the number of personal income tax brackets from ten to three. This signalled a broader movement away from collective social responsibility to an increasingly individualized social policy arena.

After a surprise election victory in September 1990, the Bob Rae-led New Democratic Party (ndp) government’s first budget continued along the course set by the Peterson Liberals, consisting of minor increases to income security programs. This included a 7 percent increase to basic social assistance rates and 10 percent increase to shelter rates, including the uploading of costs for single parents from municipalities and raising lone parents to the same income standard as two-parent families. The ndp retreated, however, from more ambitious increases in corporate and wealth taxes as well as public auto insurance, succumbing to the fiscal orthodoxy of balanced budgets and the mounting constraints of neoliberal policymaking (Evans and Shields 2011; Walkom 1994).

This pressure was evident in the ndp’s withdrawal from its efforts at municipal reform recommended by the Sewell Commission’s report on the reform of the planning and development system in Ontario. Chaired by former Toronto Mayor John Sewell, the report suggested modest changes to planning legislation by placing checks on sprawl and densifying urban development. The plan was met with a torrent of backlash from the development and real estate industries, citing excessive environmental and land use regulation. Like the report of the Advisory Committee to the Minister of Municipal Affairs on the Provincial–Municipal Financial Relationship chaired by Grant Hopcroft (1991), which recommended that local governments have access to adequate revenue sources combined with limited conditional transfers from the provinces (although the report did not recommend new revenue tools), the retreat from both the Sewell Commission and Provincial–Municipal Advisory Committee ended any further attempts by the ndp at reforming provincial–municipal relations, leaving in place the ad hoc negotiations and regulations that had defined Ontario planning (Desfor and Keil 2004; Walker 1994). The Ontario Fair Tax Commission suffered a similar fate, which, among its 138 recommendations, suggested moving away from local property taxes and instead making the personal income tax system more progressive in order to alleviate provincial–local revenue pressures.

By the early 1990s, Ontario’s economic climate had changed drastically as the deep recession temporarily reduced corporate profitability, leading to a concentrated string of layoffs, particularly in the manufacturing and industrial sectors, spurring a renewed bout of capitalist and state restructuring. Unemployment jumped from 5.1 percent in 1989 to 10.9 percent in 1992, while welfare costs rose drastically and declining tax revenues increased provincial indebtedness. Having inherited a $3 billion deficit from the Peterson Liberals, the ndp found the deficit to be growing at a much faster rate than anyone had anticipated. By 1991 the deficit was estimated to be in the then-record range of $10 billion, and job losses continued to grow in cities across the province, as they did in Toronto, where 78,000 jobs were lost in the first year of the crisis alone.

The recession of the 1990s was intensified by the Bank of Canada’s emphasis on anti-inflationary high interest rates, which ignored rising unemployment. By 1993 some cities and regions in Ontario were experiencing unemployment rates bordering on 14 percent. By the mid-1990s a very different Ontario had emerged than that which had predominated during the previous three decades. Manufacturing as a percentage of total employment shrunk from 31 to 21 percent, while services grew from 47 to 74 percent. Through the remainder of their tenure, the ndp amended both the Employment Standards Act and Labour Relations Act, improving workers’ ability to recover unpaid wages, enhancing pay equity provisions, expanding the rights of domestic and agricultural workers to organize, placing restrictions on the use of replacement workers, increasing the remedial powers of the Ontario Labour Relations Board and extending the rights of unions to “combine” bargaining units within the same company. Income and consumption taxes were also raised to the tune of $2 billion (Thomas 2009). Yet, these changes were overshadowed by an Expenditure Control Plan that cut eleven thousand public sector jobs while finding another $4 billion through “efficiency-generating” mechanisms. As well, the infamous Social Contract imposed another $2 billion in cuts through a three-year wage freeze for 900,000 public sector workers, including a 5 percent reduction in wages through twelve compulsory unpaid days off.

The short-term intensity of the economic crisis coupled with long-term structural changes and significant mobilizations by public and private sector unions and community activists proved fatal to the ndp government. Over the course of its five years, the ndp government shifted away from Keynesian demand-side managed growth and instead adopted the narrow confines of neoliberalism, treating the recession and deficit not as a symptom of capitalism’s propensity to crises but as a result of spendthrift public services and union salaries (McBride 2001; Evans 2012, 2013). This reflected the ndp’s political and ideological embrace of neoliberalism as the policy prescriptions separating the three major parties grew thinner. With the 1995 election of the Mike Harris-led government a new form of conservatism emerged in Ontario, one that would advance the neoliberal agenda to new heights and have particularly detrimental consequences for its regional governments, townships and cities.

Chapter Three

Merger Mania and the Making of the Megacity, 1995–2005

The election of the Mike Harris Conservatives in 1995 signified the hard right pursuit of neoliberal policies in Ontario. The Conservative government brought down two statements in 1995: the Fiscal Overview and Spending Cuts and Fiscal and Economic Statement, which represented a radical turn to “slash and burn” neoliberalism. The measures were wide ranging in their impacts across Ontario municipalities. Among the first pieces of legislation rescinded by the Harris government was the Planning Reform Act, which sought to curb urban sprawl by linking municipal requirements to provincial planning applications, zoning by-laws and other planning-related measures. The catalogue of other measures negatively impacting the fiscal capacity and service provision of municipalities undertaken by the Harris government is lengthy. This includes a moratorium on the development of non-profit housing and cooperatives; suspension of $234 million worth of spending on public transportation, road and highway maintenance; elimination of recycling funds and environmental grants to municipalities totaling $24 million; $290 million in funding cuts to the Ontario Municipal Support Program; over $12 million in cuts to public libraries; cancellation of the conversion of private-sector childcare spaces into non-profit spaces; and reduction in transfers to school boards by $400 million (Government of Ontario 1995a, 1995b). By 1999, the Conservatives had made over ninety-nine different tax cuts (Government of Ontario 1999), significantly eroding public revenues and aggravating the revenue crisis across municipalities.

Amalgamation and the Devolution Revolution

In 1996, the Greater Toronto Area Task Force recommended merging five upper-tier governments into a single-tier Greater Toronto regional body that would be responsible for land-use and transit planning, economic development, infrastructure and highways. Lower-tier municipalities would see their powers and responsibilities strengthened to meet more locally specific needs. The Task Force reintegrated the need to treat the Greater Toronto region as a whole, integrating both long-term planning and infrastructure costs as well local services provisioning (gta Task Force 1996).

Table 1 Municipal Share of Local Services Realignment (lsr) as a Percentage of Funding Responsibility for Ontario Municipalities, 1998

Service

Pre-lsr

Post-lsr

Social Assistance

20%

20%

Administration

50%

50%

Ontario Disability Support Program (odsp)

0%

20%

Childcare Services

0%

20%

odsp & Childcare Administration

0%

50%

Ontario Drug Benefit

0%

50%

Public Health*

25%

50%

Land Ambulance**

0%

100%

Social Housing

0%

100%

Municipal Transit Costs***

67%

100%

Property Assessment

0%

100%

Sewer and Water

90%

100%

Policing

90%

100%

Farm & Conservation Lands Tax Rebates

0%

100%

Children’s Aid Societies

20%

0%

* Public health costs returned to pre-lsr share in 2007

** Land ambulance funding share shifted to 50-50% in 1999

*** GO Transit completely devolved to municipalities, but reassumed by Province in 2002

Source: Côté and Fenn 2014

That same year, a fourth inquiry in less than a decade examining provincial–municipal administration and spending arrangements was launched. The Who Does What Panel, chaired by John Sewell, recommended enhanced local coordination of regional activities, while the Province take over administration and funding responsibility for public health and long-term care as well as welfare, childcare, employment and disability supports. The panel’s report recommended the creation of a Greater Toronto Services Board (GTSB), eliminating five upper-tier governments and amalgamating smaller municipalities with larger cities, although the panel was divided over whether the six municipalities of Metropolitan Toronto should be merged into one city or divided into four.

In the end, the provincial Conservatives ignored the reports, beginning their own series of controversial municipal amalgamations that permanently reconfigured the urban and regional political economy of the province. The Harris Conservatives also intervened in the public education system, leading to one of the most violent labour confrontations in Ontario history, and reorganized school boards, eroding both residential and business property taxes, weakening trustee authority and assuming greater control over education policy. The Community Reinvestment Fund was created to support local fiscal capacities, although many municipalities still saw increased use of own-source revenues (Sancton 2000). Local Services Realignment — that is, the devolution or downloading of public services onto municipalities — resulted in urban and regional governments assuming partial or full funding responsibility for social housing, childcare, seniors’ drug benefits, disability support payments, transit, public health, ambulance, fire, police and property assessments.

When Harris came into office there were 815 municipalities in Ontario. The Fewer Municipal Politicians Act of 1996 reduced that number to 447 by 2001. At the same time, the number of municipal councillors was reduced from 4,586 to 2,804, while the number of school board trustees fell from 1,900 to 700 (Sancton 2000; Boudreau, Keil and Young 2009). As of 2013 Ontario had 444 municipalities of varying structures (Found 2012; Slack and Bird 2013).

The largest and most extensive amalgamation occurred under the provisions of the 1997 City of Toronto Act where six cities and seven governments were merged, creating the new single-tier City of Toronto — one of the world’s few megacities created specifically for neoliberal purposes (Carson and Siemiatycki 2014; Kozolanka 2007). For Keil (1998), the amalgamation of the City of Toronto was an ill-conceived “solution” by the provincial Conservatives to strengthen their suburban base at the expense of the urban core. Restructuring of Ontario municipalities involved a massive devolution of program spending and responsibilities onto municipalities, including social services, public school services, non-profit housing, roads, public infrastructure, long-term healthcare, childcare, shelters, children’s aid societies, ambulance, fire and police services and waste collection, as well as public health and transportation. Like related devolutionary measures from federal to provincial governments, downloaded responsibilities onto municipalities by the Harris government occurred without an equivalent transfer of funding or matching fiscal supports for the new responsibilities. Amalgamation was overwhelmingly rejected by urban social movements, trade unionists, municipal politicians and the general public across Ontario because it was seen as homogenizing local specificity and being less locally responsive than the structure it was replacing (Boudreau 2000; Kipfer 1998). But this did little to deter the Conservatives from amalgamating communities. The Conservatives argued that amalgamation was in the interest of all Ontarians. The political promise was that it would lower costs, remove barriers to investment, enable private sector job creation and increase the political coherence and economic efficiency of municipalities, particularly of “global cities” like Toronto.

Table 2 Municipal Structure in Ontario, 2013

Type of Tier

Number of Municipalities

Single Tiers

Southern Ontario

29

Northern Ontario

144

Total Single Tiers

173

Lower Tiers

Within a Region

43

Within a County

198

Total Lower Tiers

241

Upper Tiers

Region

8

County

22

Total Upper Tiers

30

Total Number of Municipalities

444

The Conservatives argued, as a now thoroughly discredited report by the accounting firm kpmg alleged at the time, that Toronto could realize through amalgamation upwards of $865 million in savings over the first three years (kpmg 1996). But this was later contradicted by a report from Deloitte and Touche (1997) that criticized kpmg’s flawed report and showed that savings would be next to nothing. In fact, just one year into amalgamation, Toronto found itself short of $164 million in tax revenues as a result of downloading, making a mockery of Harris’s (and kpmg’s) projected cost-savings.

The municipalities of Ottawa, Hamilton, Sudbury, Kingston and Chatham-Kent were also amalgamated as part of the 2001 Municipal Act, which consolidated dozens of municipal statutes and entrenched neoliberal administrative reforms. In what was to become a recurring saga, rather than address the structural deficit of Ontario municipalities, the provincial government proceeded to provide one-time fiscal injections and short-term loans. As a result of this structurally created shortfall (downloading and the erosion of public revenue through tax cuts), Ontario municipalities have sought to deal with these fiscal challenges by seeking concessions from workers, contracting-out, privatization and raising user fees. By 2003 the so-called Progressive Conservatives had eliminated more than $650 million from municipal transfers.

The movement away from shared-cost provincial–municipal funding shifted the onus of revenue generation from provincial income and corporate tax revenues to the narrower, less responsive and progressive base of municipal property taxes. Amalgamation of cities did little to reduce the costs of public administration; rather it led to wide-ranging cuts to social services provisioning, demands for concessions from labour and a structural deficit at the municipal level. The Conservative tenure at Queen’s Park from 1995 to 2003 radically extended neoliberal policies into the overall architecture of public administration and services provisioning (Sancton 2000; Boudreau 2000). For municipalities, territorial boundaries were remade and responsibility for delivering services increased despite the absence of an equivalent transfer of governance autonomy or administrative powers to raise revenues.

Similar retrenchment was occurring at the federal scale during this period. The 1995 federal budget terminated the Canada Assistance Plan and Established Programs Financing, replacing them with a block fund called the Canada Health and Social Transfer (chst). The chst represented a significant reduction of provincial transfers for social assistance, post-secondary education and healthcare funding. The new block funding removed the previous 50/50 cost-sharing arrangement and replaced it with a combination of cash and tax point transfers that were frozen at the 1995 level for the next five years, significantly eroding the real level of funding due to inflation and population growth. This unilateral devolution of social welfare responsibility not only cut and decentralized federal funding, it also led to an erosion of national enforcement standards and a reduction in the quality and scope of public services, along with a consequent downloading onto provincial, metropolitan and regional governments.

Alongside the cuts to transfers, the federal Liberals launched a series of uncoordinated programs targeted at urban issues. One was the 1998 Urban Aboriginal Strategy, which provided $25 million over three years to cities in order to build organizational capacities within urban Aboriginal communities and develop partnerships with provincial and municipal governments. The fund also sought to coordinate federal government resources with provincial and municipal departments in order to address the disparity between urban Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal groups (aandc 2005). A year later, the federal government launched the National Homelessness Initiative as a way of channelling funds to municipalities in order to deal with poverty across the provinces and territories. In 2000, the Infrastructure Canada Program was launched, distributing $2 billion over the next decade for local infrastructure projects, as was the Green Municipal Fund, which was to be managed by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. This provided $125 million for local environmental initiatives. In 2001, the Green Municipal Fund was doubled and an additional $680 million was allocated to cities under the Affordable Housing Program. Another $2 billion was directed to municipalities in the form of the Canadian Strategic Infrastructure Fund, along with $600 million for the Border Infrastructure Fund.

A year later, the federal government combined various infrastructure and grant programs under Infrastructure Canada, which included a notional effort to fund a New Deal for Cities and Communities (Bradford 2007). The intent was to address both municipal fiscal pressures, particularly those related to infrastructure, as well as public policy concerns. The 2004 and 2005 federal budgets included a full goods and services tax rebate (worth some $7 billion over ten years), five cents per litre of the federal gas tax allocated on a per capita basis (worth approximately $9 billion over five years) and $800 million for public transit distributed on the basis of transit ridership, which recognized the particular needs of large cities. In addition to new municipal revenue transfers, new intergovernmental consultative bodies were created, which brought together urban development experts and community groups. Federal–municipal re-engagement, however, proved short lived.

Toronto: Setting the Stage for Competitive Austerity

In Toronto, while the three decades following WWII emphasized the retooling of war-time industries and large-scale infrastructure investments, the period since then can be understood as a continuous process of internationalizing the local economy through competitive austerity. Greg Albo (1994) defines competitive austerity as making labour more flexible, enhancing managerial prerogatives, reducing government services that act as a drain on competition, shedding public assets and weakening labour laws and employment standards, aiming to turn the state into a series of internally competitive markets. As a result of both external and local pressures, economic development in the city moved away from manufacturing and goods-producing sectors toward a neoliberal model premised on exporting services related to finance, insurance and real estate. The effort to create a different kind of local state was part of a broader strategy of enhancing competitiveness within the city and vis-à-vis other territories (Lemon 1985; Todd 1998; Caulfield 1994).

As the centre of financial capital in Canada, Toronto is headquarters to six of Canada’s largest insurers and Canada’s five largest banks, and is the nation’s largest employment centre, responsible for one-sixth of all Canadian jobs. More than 300,000 workers are concentrated in the financial services industry, which is expected to overtake London as a hub for financial services by 2020 (Heinrich 2012). Indeed, a Toronto Life (Livesey 2012: 70) article boasted that one-third of the city’s lawyers and accountants work for the financial sector in some form. Uncritically advocating for a finance-led future, Toronto Life went on to argue: “In the new economy, Ontario doesn’t make stuff anymore. We let other places do that; our new job is to lend, invest, and manage people’s money.” Since 2000, financial sector stocks have had a 5.7 percent higher annual return than non-financial stocks. Today the financial sector controls an estimated 20 to 30 percent of the capitalization on the Toronto Stock exchange, growing at twice the rate of the rest of the economy and almost doubling since the 1980s. As a result, the financial industry is now nearing 8 percent of the total share of the economy — similar to the share of the U.S. financial sector right before it crashed (Sanger 2011b).

Federal deregulatory changes enacted in 1987 that allowed chartered banks to buy and own brokerage firms, something that they had previously been forbidden to do, furthered efforts to attract increasingly mobile global capital investment. Banks increasingly sought to solidify their power through new mergers, acquisitions, speculative investments and share buybacks. In 2010, bonuses paid to Canada’s six largest banks reached a record $8.9 billion before setting a new all-time high in 2011 with $9.5 billion. Seemingly immune to the recessionary pressures of governments, corporate directors’ compensation jumped 33 percent between 2008 and 2010 (Livesey 2012: 19). The city has a significant contingent of producer and media services, as well as a whole range of low-wage service and hospitality industries, especially professional services tied to housing-related demand for credit, renovations and legal services. Like other “global cities,” this has made Toronto highly dependent upon the internationalization of capital — both to the world market and the rest of Canada (Sassen 2005). While taxation, financial transfers, intergovernmental jurisdictions and Toronto’s unique position in the global political economy have undergone major changes, Toronto’s labour market also underwent significant demographic shifts. In the 1960s manufacturing accounted for roughly 30 percent of the city’s labour force, but by 2007 this had fallen to less than 15 percent. And since 2002, nearly one in five jobs in manufacturing have disappeared. In its place has arisen one of Toronto’s largest segments of the labour force: employment related to the burgeoning financial, insurance and real estate industries.

Since the 1980s both the federal and provincial governments, when faced with their own budgetary dilemmas, sought to “solve” their revenue shortfalls by eliminating social programs, seeking concessions from their workforces and downloading responsibility without power onto other tiers of government. From Prime Ministers Mulroney and Chretien, who drastically reduced transfer payments to the provinces, to Ontario Premiers Rae and Harris, who froze public sector wages and unilaterally amalgamated cities thereby devolving funding responsibilities without matching fiscal supports, urban and regional governments have long been subject to “top down” neoliberalism, while remaining active embodiments in their own right (Friskin 1993; Kipfer and Petrunia 2009). In the run-up to amalgamation, commentators increasingly drew attention to two divergent paths to urbanization, illustrated by the neighbouring cities of “old” downtown Toronto and North York. Old Toronto sought to deal with growth pressures by increasing density requirements, expanding public transit and using the property tax base to fund a range of social services. North York, on the other hand, where fiscal conservatism ruled, was characterized by automobile-dependent urban sprawl and the provision of services through the private market. Increasingly, Old Toronto came to represent the decaying Keynesian order, while North York embodied municipalities’ neoliberal future.

Neoliberalism tied its agenda to a re-engineering of the local state, but refused to transfer administrative and fiscal powers, which in the process intensified inter-local competition between Toronto and its surrounding municipalities (in effect exacerbating pre-existing disparities in wealth and income and also creating them anew). Moreover, because Toronto was envisaged as the strategic terrain through which Ontario and Canada were linked to the global economy, neoliberal reforms sought to give the local government and businesses the “flexibility” to promote Toronto as a competitive “global city” (Kipfer and Keil 2002; Keil 1998, 2002). The 1998 mayoral election pitted the Old Toronto and North York versions of urban governance against each other with the latter model emerging as the blueprint for future developments. For Todd (1998), the institutional and administrative redesign of local government, embodied by the electoral victory of Mel Lastman as mayor of Toronto in 1998 (he had served as mayor of North York for nearly a quarter century), represented the victory of a neoliberalized urban political regime more than twenty-five years in the making.

As a “stand in” for the provincial Conservatives, the megacity’s first mayor promised to freeze property taxes for ten years, bring down civic workers’ pay and privatize city services and assets (Boudreau et al. 2009). This was done in the context of overlapping pay scales among civic workers, planning frameworks, rates of taxation, breadth of services provided and assets held by the six former local governments that now comprised the new single-tier City of Toronto. Mayor Lastman and City Council’s policies immediately made themselves felt on municipal workers as demands for workplace concessions become the new norm.

Early Confrontations: In the Shadow of Third Way Urbanism

In an attempt to remake the local state in the image of its provincial Conservative counterpart, Mayor Lastman and Council attempted to deal with Toronto’s fiscal challenges by implementing its own set of “slash and burn” policies. These revolved around extracting concessions from workers and freeing up new profit-making opportunities in public services for private corporations. The equalization of wages was also a central issue, as there remained a range of pay scales across the city’s former municipalities. Local 79 sought to match wage scales with the old City of Toronto contract, while the City sought to harmonize them downwards with the former City of Etobicoke, where some workers had not seen a wage increase since 1989 (Ray 2000). Local 79 negotiators proposed to the City that the issues of harmonization, job security, benefits and seniority rights be decided by a provincial arbitrator, but the City refused to do so unless it could first define how the 2,800 different jobs at City Hall would be classified. The result was a ten-day strike in 2000 by eighteen thousand cupe Local 79 workers over the City’s attempts to lower wages and weaken job security provisions. The strike was the first by Local 79 in the newly amalgamated City of Toronto and took place within the backdrop of mounting labour-capital conflicts in the province amid a strengthening of anti-worker legislation by the Mike Harris Conservatives. The then-largest city strike in Canadian history ended ten days later in a stalemate of sorts as a three-year agreement saw the issue of wage harmonization unresolved, although civic workers did receive a 2 percent increase in 1999, 2.17 percent in 2000 and 3.2 percent in 2001, along with a lump sum payment of $400. But this was just the beginning of labour–management conflicts in a new era of amalgamation.

In 2002, cupe Local 79 once again struck over renewed efforts to contract-out, lower wages and remove job security protections. However, this time Local 79 was joined by the 5,500-member cupe Local 416. Mayor Mel Lastman spoke of city workers “holding the city hostage” in their quest for “jobs for life” (cbc 2000). He vowed to bring municipal wages across Toronto’s districts in line with the lower pay scales of Etobicoke, in addition to outsourcing waste collection and increasing the use of seasonal and temporary employment. Sixteen days into the strike, with over one million visitors expected for World Youth Day and a visit by the Pope, Conservative Premier Ernie Eves (who had become premier upon Harris stepping down) legislated strikers back to work. In seeking to move the strike from the streets and into the courtrooms, the provincial Conservatives, with the support of Lastman and City Council, removed the right to strike using the rationale that the economic benefits of World Youth Day and the Pope’s visit outweighed workers’ right to strike. After four months, the provincial conciliator assigned to the labour dispute ruled in a way that limited rollbacks of job security and workplace provisions. The new three-year agreement saw 3 percent increases in each year of the contract, and 5 percent for paramedics. The issue of wage harmonization across the city’s districts, however, remained unresolved as the conciliator requested more time. It would stay unresolved for nearly a decade longer.

After the 2002 strike, activist union members in Local 79 raised the need to be prepared well in advance of a possible strike in terms of planning coordination, mobilization and trying to develop new strategies to garner public support. This included suggestions for political and workplace education in order to mobilize more and new members, efforts to create tighter bonds with community organizations and initiatives to build confidence within the rank and file to take on managerial orders. Illustrative of the complex social interactions among union members following the strike, some were openly critical of Local 79’s leadership, while others were more hesitant for fear of weakening solidarity or out of the hope that they could change the leadership’s policy from within. However, despite occasionally raising these concerns at membership meetings, there were few sustained efforts to regenerate union involvement or to democratize the union and prepare for a future strike.

After three decades as Mayor, first of North York and later the new megacity, Mel Lastman indicated that he would not be running for re-election. As a former New Democratic Party candidate, mayoral contender David Miller had forged close alliances with many labour and community activists and sought to present himself as the “progressive” alternative, implicitly rejecting the singular business-driven, neoliberal model of development at all costs. In late 2003, David Miller was elected mayor. Mayor Miller and his executive came from the “progressive wing” of Council — a loose alliance between social democrats, Liberals and a few independents. The electoral basis for this “Third Way” coalition had drawn extensive backing from public sector unions, the Toronto and York Region Labour Council and progressive urban social movements. While in power Miller governed with the support of these movements in a kind of informal cooperation. As the 2005 round of collective bargaining approached, city officials noted that the Province had signalled its preference for wage settlements of around 2 percent. They also noted that federal settlements with its unionized public sector workers averaged annual increments of between 2.25 and 2.5 percent over three to four years. It initially looked as though a repeat of 2000 and 2002 was on order when the City refused to allow cupe to deliver some services that had been previously outsourced. After 103 days of negotiations with Local 416 a second strike deadline of June 22 was averted at the eleventh hour with a promise to allow its workers to deliver some of those services. The agreement was essentially rolled over to Local 79 and the City, who managed to come to an agreement without the threat of a strike. Wage settlements saw increases of 2.75 percent in 2005, 3 percent in 2006 and 3.25 percent in 2007 and 2008. Mayor Miller and Council’s progressive city alternative had largely been defined by notions of building Toronto as a “green economy,” a “creative city,” a “diverse city” and one with “living wages” (Desfor et al. 2006; Kipfer 2007; Kipfer and Petrunia 2009). These notions, while having some merits, also demonstrated profound political limitations. Notably, none of them really got at the urban revenue crisis that Toronto and other municipalities faced in light of decade after decade of underfunding.

As noted by Cote and Fenn (2014), outside of provincial and federal transfers, Ontario municipalities derive some 62 percent of their own-source revenue from property taxes and from this they must provide for their public utilities, public works, parks and recreational facilities, waste management, transit services, public housing and other services. Transfers from other governments as a whole represent some 20 percent of local government revenues, which go towards covering the costs of benefit programs administered locally. Social assistance comprises over 40 percent of such operating transfers alone. Hence, a majority of provincial transfers are conditional, meaning they must go toward expenditures mandated by the donor government. By 2011, they represented 94 percent of transfers to municipalities. This differs from conditional grants, which are matching grants that require equal contribution from recipient governments. Ontario municipalities’ singular dependence on property taxes is problematic for a number of reasons. First, unlike income taxes, which are withheld at the source, and sales taxes, which are paid in small amounts with each purchase, property taxes generally have to be paid directly in the form of periodic lump sum payments; hence they are a very visible tax. Because the ability to make these payments requires advanced savings or increases in debt, the saliency of property taxes disproportionately impacts low-income households and seniors, many of whom may be asset rich but income poor. Second, unlike income, corporate and sales taxes, property taxes do not grow with the economy. This inelasticity results in an improvised and politically driven process whereby annual increases are usually necessary in order to maintain the existing property tax base.

The political and economic limitations of Miller’s progressivism soon became evident in the subsequent round of bargaining as the twin perils of already-existing fiscal constraint and economic recession coincided. In order to meet its fiscal challenges — challenges generated by neoliberal policies and successive rounds of downloading from federal and provincial governments — City Council looked to extract wage and benefit concessions from its unionized workforce using the rationale that Toronto’s budgetary challenges arise from overgenerous public services and civic workers’ compensation. What made the 2009 round of collective bargaining between the City of Toronto and cupe Local 79 (and 416) workers so intense was that Toronto’s so-called “fiscal crisis” had merged with unprecedented national and provincial deficits (themselves the result of successive decades of tax cuts and revenue generation erosion).

How these structural fiscal problems have been addressed by the City of Toronto, with similar attempts in municipalities elsewhere, underlies an ongoing municipal services and infrastructure investment deficit. Other levels of government have partly recognized the urban fiscal impasse but have done very little to address it in a structural way. This is in spite of the fact that, since amalgamation but particularly in periods of “economic crisis,” local spending pressures increase as the demand for public amenities rises as a result of people being unable to access “market-determined” services, in addition to marked periods of poverty, food and housing insecurity. In other words, demands for local services are growing because of the social dislocations of neoliberalism, population growth and the need for greater revenue capacities to meet those needs. And yet, mainstream public policy responses seek to further individualize social services responsibility by extending forms of marketization as part of sweeping “cost-containment” measures.

Second, corresponding city councils have, on the one hand, expanded user fees and consumption-based taxes on residents while, on the other hand, shifting away from commercial property taxes, undervaluing business land assessments and providing grants and financial incentives for major developers and large corporations. Although the City of Toronto Act, 2006, extended some revenue powers to the City, the expanded powers under the Act have not been fully utilized. In 2007, the City published estimates for a range of revenue tools that were newly available, including billboard taxes, vehicle registration taxes, land transfer taxes, sales taxes on alcoholic beverages, tobacco and entertainment, parking taxes, road tolls and congestion fees. It was estimated that these new measures could bring in as much as $750 million annually (City of Toronto 2007). Mayor David Miller and his council utilized two of these in the form of the Municipal Land Transfer Tax and the Personal Vehicle Ownership Tax. At the same time, however, city councillors also “approved generous property tax breaks to attract high-paying, knowledge-economy jobs to strategic areas of the city, although the business community is already urging the city to further sweeten the pot” (Hanes 2008; Inside Toronto 2008). These incentives include “Brownfield remediation” (city subsidies, tax incentives and/or deferrals for major capital investments in properties requiring environmental clean-ups or in underdeveloped areas of the city), as well as Tax Increment Equivalent Grants (tiegs) that include payments in lieu of taxes and subsidies/rebates for commercial developers. tiegs are a form of publically funded tax incentives equal to all or a portion of the municipal property tax increase (increment) following the completion of a project that has resulted in an increase in the assessed value of a property. As the “progressive coalition” at City Hall insisted on wage concessions from its workers amid reductions to services, one of the few exceptions in speaking out against service-level and staff cuts had been radical sections of the anti-poverty movement (Clarke 2008; Bradford 2007). And for good reason: the poor have seen a continued deterioration of urban services and marked increases in unmet healthcare needs, shelter and food bank usage from Mayor Lastman to Mayor Miller, despite new incentives for business-related development. Those hardest hit include women, Indigenous peoples, immigrants, historically racialized communities and persons with disabilities (Stapleton et al. 2012; cspct 2009).

Third, there remain pressures to increase the contracting-out of city services and employment and the privatization of some capital assets as a means of temporarily relieving structural budgetary deficits. City Council and administrators continue to discuss, and the Toronto Board of Trade and other business associations continue to lobby for, privatizing Toronto Hydro and the Toronto Parking Authority, which together have earned the City more than $2 billion since amalgamation (Dale 2011c). This includes additional attempts to outsource waste collection, childcare, recreation and other services, as well as privatizing Regent Park, Toronto’s most well-known public housing project (Kipfer and Petrunia 2009). But the actual evidence regarding contracting-out and privatization suggests that the privatization of public-sector jobs, and the experiences of private-sector building projects on urban transport and infrastructure projects, has correlated with more expensive and less efficient goods and services, reduced public oversight and a lower quality of services provisioning (Loxley 2010). A major report undertaken by the Ontario auditor-general (2014), Bonnie Lysyk, found that of the seventy-four completed public-private partnership projects between 2003 and 2014, Ontario could have saved up to $8 billion through traditional public procurement. The report also went on to criticize the provincial Liberals’ continuing practice of “high risk” loans, particularly the $308 million loan to the research incubator Medical and Related Sciences as part of a failed real estate deal. The report also chided the government for not acting on recommendations left over from the Walkerton water tragedy, weak childcare oversight and lack of services for people with developmental disabilities. Citing a lack of empirical data to substantiate the provincial government’s assumption that public-private partnerships are preferable to publically procured and developed projects, Lysyk found that private partnerships are more expensive because companies pay about fourteen times what the government does for financing and receive a premium from taxpayers in exchange for taking on the project. This report parallels research undertaken by Siemiatycki and Farooqi (2012), which found twenty-eight public-private partnerships undertaken in Ontario between 2007 and 2010 to be 16 percent more expensive than traditional public procurement. While the sale of assets and contracting-out may provide one-time fiscal injections, they will not solve the underlying structural revenue crisis facing Ontario municipalities. Rather than generating cost savings, then, the empirical evidence suggests that public-private partnerships end up costing more money than had they been publically procured (tea 2011; Furlong 2007; Vining and Boardman 2008; Krawchencko and Stoney 2011; Sanger 2011).

Fourth, the City continues to seek wage freezes and concessions from its city workers with the idea that in reducing its direct wage bill the fiscal problems of Toronto could be eased. Yet Toronto’s fiscal challenges do not reside with the wages of city workers. They emerge from the distributional and tax policies that the City has adopted, and particularly the failure of federal and provincial governments to properly fund social services while using ever more of municipal budgets to fund the policing and security apparatuses of the state, and the incessant campaigns at “branding” the city to subsidize business. As Jim Stanford, who sat as part of the City’s 2007 Independent Fiscal Review Panel, has argued, despite being well run at the operational level and comparatively efficient, Toronto’s fiscal challenges are a result of an ongoing structural deficit: “In reviewing financial data on the city’s compensation costs, our report debunked the stereotype that the city’s employees are ‘fat cats’ … average [annual] compensation for unionized workers (including overtime) was less than $40,000 in 2007” (Stanford 2008; City of Toronto 2008). There is scant evidence to suggest that the City’s fiscal challenges are tied to overgenerous social services or excessive public sector compensation. As will be discussed in the chapter that follows, the City of Toronto used the 2009 round of collective bargaining to make the case that continued public services were dependent on union wage restraint. This zero-sum rationale resulted in a contentious thirty-nine-day strike in 2009 by cupe Locals 79 and 416 as the City sought to shift the costs of the crisis onto the public sector by seeking wage and benefit concessions and reducing access to public services.

Chapter Four

Consolidating Municipal Neoliberalism, 2006–2011

After thirteen years of Liberal rule in Ottawa, the federal Conservatives formed a minority government in 2006 under the leadership of Stephen Harper. The election of the Conservatives reversed some of the encouraging programs initiated by the briefly gvoerning Paul Martin Liberals and turned toward a more circumscribed federal role in municipalities. Likewise, as the Great Recession spread throughout the Province of Ontario, the Liberals responded to the crisis through a consolidated series of measures that sought to open the province for business. The embrace of neoliberal austerity measures consisted of tax relief, a wage freeze for public sector employees, the privatization of public assets and reforms to “modernize” employment standards legislation. Together, these changes further eroded federal and provincial revenue-raising capacities, compounding fiscal pressures and setting the tone for municipalities to follow.

Plus ça Change, Plus C’est la Même Chose

Consistent with the steady retreat of the federal government from municipal issues, especially those linked to direct revenue transfers, the federal Conservatives have shown limited interest in moving beyond piecemeal injections of funds into urban policy issues (Stoney and Graham 2009). The two most important initiatives have been the Building Canada Infrastructure Plan and the Gas Tax fund. The former provided $40 billion for municipal infrastructure over 2007–2014. However, considering that the municipal infrastructure investment deficit is expected to reach $400 billion by 2020, this covers only a small fraction of outstanding needs. The latter provides Canadian municipalities with $2 billion annually and since 2013 has been indexed to inflation (Warren 2013). The 2009 federal budget provided some $12 billion in new infrastructure spending. But many municipal projects missed a federal government-mandated completion deadline in 2012, with Infrastructure Canada remaining “tight-lipped on the amount of money municipalities left on the table” (Tapper 2012). The Conservatives also provided an additional $1.25 billion in funding to support provincial, territorial and municipal budgets, but made this funding contingent on public-private partnerships. While these investments may seem large, it is important to recall that the reduction of the Goods and Services Tax from 7 to 6 and later 5 percent eroded some $220 billion in revenues between 2006 and 2012 (Whittington 2011). That is revenue that could have been used for any number of issues, including new investments in social programs, infrastructure and dedicated revenue streams for municipalities.

A similar process of fiscal retrenchment was occurring at the provincial level. In light of mounting public protests toward the provincial Conservatives — especially around the shooting death of Indigenous protestor Dudley George at Ipperwash, attacks against public sector workers and the tainted water scandal in Walkerton — in the 2003 election the provincial Liberals ran on a platform that prioritized public investments in healthcare and education, environmental protection, holding the line on taxes and rebuilding relationships with Ontario’s local governments. Under leader Dalton McGuinty, the Liberals positioned themselves as “moderates,” forming a majority government in 2003. Centrist intimations notwithstanding, the Liberals’ first task was tackling the $5.6 billion deficit inherited from their predecessors. In key ways, this can be seen as an adaptation of neoliberal public policies, though in a less overt form than Harris, by a government that took power by positioning itself through supposedly centrist policies (Fanelli and Thomas 2011). While the first term of the McGuinty government was characterized by relative labour peace, the twin perils of economic recession and declining revenues gave new impetus to opening Ontario for business at the expense of public services and workers, with urban and regional governments receiving weak fiscal restitute.

Rather than depart from the market-led revamping of the public sector and rectify the provincial–municipal fiscal imbalance exacerbated by the Mike Harris Conservatives, the Dalton McGuinty Liberals consolidated neoliberal policies into the overall architecture of public policy, with a few modest amendments. In addition to the City of Toronto Act, 2006, discussed earlier, the Province also passed the Municipal Statute Law Amendment Act, 2006. This Act broadened the authority of municipalities to determine their governance structures, establish accountability offices and determine appropriate procedural and notice requirements subsequent to planning and other measures. It also grants municipalities the ability to provide any service or thing that the municipality considers necessary or desirable for the public, and the ability to pass new by-laws in the areas of accountability and transparency of the municipality and the operation of its local boards, and public assets of the municipality acquired for the purpose of exercising its authority under this or any other Act. This includes the economic, social and environmental well-being of the municipality; the health, safety and well-being of persons, services and things that the municipality is authorized to provide that it considers necessary or desirable for the public; and the protection of persons and property, including new consumer protections (City of Milton 2007). New powers assigned to municipalities also granted more control over the demolition of rental properties, green energy requirements and city building standards such as height and density requirements and faster approval of community improvement plans and brownfield remediation. While both Acts extended new municipal powers, they stopped short of extending additional recognition of operational autonomy in the absence of provincial oversight and/or new revenue powers related to income, wealth, gas or general sales.

In 2006, the Liberals launched the Provincial–Municipal Fiscal and Service Delivery Review (Government of Ontario 2008). Reporting in 2008, the Review proposed the Province take over some (but not all) of the services and responsibilities downloaded onto municipalities during the Harris era. Staggered until 2018, the Province agreed to upload some of the costs associated with provincial court services, prisoner transport, public transit and portions of the Ontario Disability Support Plan, Ontario Drug Benefit Plan and Ontario Works. The provincial update schedule included uploading 80 percent of the Ontario Drug Benefit, which was completed in 2008; 50 percent of the Ontario Disability Support Program (odsp) Administration, fulfilled in 2009; and 80 percent of odsp Benefits, which was accomplished in 2011. In 2010, the Province began taking responsibility for Ontario Works benefits up to a maximum of 80 percent by 2018; and in 2012, initiated the transfer of court security costs up to 14.3 percent by 2018. As important and noteworthy as these measures are, they do not signal a refutation of Harris’s devolution revolution, but rather the adaptation of neoliberal policies designed to place continual pressures on the municipal delivery of public services.

Total intergovernmental transfers have been on a downward trajectory, having fallen more than 6 percent, from 22.9 percent of total revenues in 1988 to 21.5 percent in 2008 (Statistics Canada 2013a). General purpose (without conditions) grants fell by over 40 percent, from 5.8 percent of all revenues in 1988 to 3.4 percent of all revenues in 2008 (Statistics Canada 2013b, 2013c). In 2012, operational spending by all municipalities in Canada amounted to 3.1 percent of Gross Domestic Product, equal to what it was twenty years ago. However, local government taxes as share of the economy declined from 4 percent in 1992 to 3 percent in 2012 (a reduction of over 20 percent) (Statistics Canada 2013c). This is close to the three-decade low reached in 2006 at 2.9 percent. Certainly, the provincial Liberals have taken some important steps to address the damage done during the Harris era. However, in the absence of uploading a larger portion of administration costs, this still leaves Ontario as the only province in Canada where municipalities are responsible for administering more than half the cost of social assistance. In fact, not only does Ontario have the lowest per-capita program spending among provinces and the lowest total government revenue per person among all Canadian provinces, including funding from federal transfers, an argument can be made that Ontario municipalities are also responsible for funding a broader range of services and subject to more specific service mandates than comparable local governments across Canada (Slack, Kitchen, McMillan and Vallaincourt 2007; Lankin and Sheikh 2012). All this has led to the cash-strapped situation Ontario municipalities now find themselves in as municipal expenditures continue to rise faster than municipal revenues. These pressures are compounded as municipalities and regional governments come to rely on unchecked growth as a way to expand their property tax base in an effort to increase revenues.

Between 1981 and 2012, Ontario’s population grew from 8.3 million to 13.5 million. Nearly 70 percent live in the Greater Golden Horseshoe (ggh), Canada’s largest continuous urban area. The ggh is also the fastest growing region in Ontario, with significant employment in manufacturing, financial services, agriculture and food processing (Ali 2008; Donald 2005). It is worth noting that Ontario has more than half of all first-class agricultural land and produces one quarter of total farm revenues in Canada, much of it in the area surrounding Toronto. Because 90 percent of Canadians live in a narrow band along the U.S. border, the erosion of prime agricultural land as a result of urban sprawl, particularly in southern Ontario, is a significant public policy concern. Only 5 percent of the Canadian land surface is of dependable agricultural use and less than 1 percent is Class One farmland. More than 52 percent of Canada’s best farmland (Class One) is in Ontario, most of it in southern Ontario where population growth pressures are highest. Ontario’s Class One through Three agricultural land represents about 6.8 percent of total land in the province and 16 percent of Canada’s total agricultural land. By 1996, more than 18 percent of Ontario’s Class One farmland was being used for urban purposes and effectively lost to agriculture (Government of Ontario 2009).

As Sara Macdonald and Roger Keil (2012) note, for decades the region has been locked into a low-density, automobile-dependent suburban growth dynamic. As a result of the uneven dispersal of population and employment between 1986 and 2001, the province has seen a 53 percent increase in the supply of new roads and 38 percent growth in new highways. At the same time, though, transit ridership over the last two decades in the form of annual passengers per capita declined in all regions across the ggh with the exception of Peel (Pond 2009). It is difficult to explain the decline in transit ridership across the Greater Toronto Area (gta) without accounting for decades of reduced public investments in transit along with subsequent declines in the condition and universality of the service. This is a recurring feature of neoliberal administration in which tax cuts are first used to degrade the quality and breadth of the service provided, which governments then invoke as a justification for “tightening spending.” When this fails, as it most certainly will in the absence of lower service levels or further labour intensification, this manipulative strategy is then used to justify privatization.

Ontario residents are among the most dependent upon automobiles in the country. In 2006, 71 percent of workers in the Toronto census metropolitan area got to work by car, while only 22 percent used public transit. More than 80 percent of all workers across other census metropolitan areas covered under the Places to Grow legislation drove to work and fewer than 10 percent took public transit. It has been estimated that congestion costs the gta alone more than $6 billion annually, as automobile-dependent urban sprawl increases air pollution, congestion along trade corridors and greenhouse gases — resulting in Ontario having the highest ground-level ozone concentration in the country (Ali 2008; Metrolinx 2008). Expensive low-density infrastructure puts upward pressure on tax rates, raising residential and commercial costs and impeding the flow of goods and services. If left unchecked, urban sprawl over the next thirty years could absorb more than one thousand square kilometres of land to meet projected population influxes of more than three million. As a result of Ontario municipalities’ governance, financial impotencies and, often, political unwillingness to check urban sprawl and concerns related to congestion and environmental degradation, the Ontario government launched the Greenbelt Act in 2005.

The Greenbelt Act is a landmark piece of legislation that covers 7,300 square kilometres of southern Ontario, stretching around the Toronto region from Rice Lake in Northumberland County in the east to the Niagara River in the southwest (see Map 1). The Act prohibits development outside existing municipal boundaries in designated areas close to environmentally sensitive lands and mandates higher residential and employment density, mixed-use communities and infill development (Ali 2008).

Under the Greenbelt Act and its companion legislation, Places to Grow, 2005, decisions about farmland and urban development have been removed from hundreds of municipal councils around the region and placed into the hands of the provincial government (Pond 2009). The Places to Grow legislation identifies sixteen major growth areas, especially mid-sized cities in southern Ontario, based on their capacity to accommodate future growth in population and employment, as well as provide vital linkages to transit systems in urban growth centres. The growth plan states that a minimum of 40 percent of all annual residential development must be built within urban areas and not on Greenfield sites — undeveloped land either used for agriculture, landscape design or naturally evolving, and being considered for new commercial or industrial development (Government of Ontario 2012).

The Greenbelt Act establishes planning and land-use restrictions, whereas the Places to Grow legislation sets a density target of fifty or more residents and jobs combined per hectare. The legislation requires that municipalities identify areas for density expansion in official municipal plans. The purpose of the Greenbelt Act is to contain urban growth, preserve farmland and agrarian economies and create compact development. Both pieces of legislation also aim to prevent land speculation and reduce growth pressures along sensitive ecological and hydrological lands, which include the Niagara Escarpment and Oak Ridges Moraine. The Greenbelt Act is about where growth is not allowed, whereas Places to Grow sets out where and how this growth should happen. This may, on the one hand, undermine pro-growth interests from dominating local councils given the broader scrutiny and administrative protocols of the provincial government. On the other, it may simply shift the focus of business lobbying to the provincial level, intensifying the worst effects of sprawl. Some greenbelt policies have succeeded to an extent in containing urban sprawl, preserving rural farmlands and increasing density, while others have led to sharp increases in the value of urban lands, such as residential and commercial real estate, in addition to pushing development to areas outside of the greenbelt where land is cheaper and building restrictions are often fewer (Ali 2008). In easing congestion, increasing the use of public transportation and raising density requirements for residential and commercial developers, Greenbelt and Places to Grow also endeavour to increase the economic competitiveness of the region as a whole by removing barriers that impede the flow of goods, services and people and/or lost productivity more broadly. In 2011, the Liberals launched the Growth Plan for Northern Ontario, which seeks to encourage private capital investment, increase economic diversification and coordinate regional policy frameworks. Much of this has centred on development initiatives around the hotly contested “Ring of Fire” in northern Ontario, a remote and sensitive ecological area that is estimated to contain billions in chrome, copper, nickel and platinum deposits. The Growth Plan has come under attack as First Nations and environmental groups have raised concerns over the deleterious socio-economic and environmental consequences of unchecked mining (McKie 2013; Thomas-Muller n.d.).

However, some sectors of the development industry in Ontario have been very vocal against the anti-sprawl legislation, arguing that it is an illegitimate intervention by provincial government into municipal affairs and that it interferes with market-based residential and commercial outcomes by placing unnecessary restraints on development (Macdonald and Keil 2012). In contrast, environmental and community groups have also criticized the Greenbelt and Places to Grow plans, arguing that they do not go far enough and that the fifty residents and jobs per gross hectare ratio could be easily doubled. They make the case that, even with the Greenbelt plan, some 425 square kilometres of rural agricultural land in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton areas will be lost by 2031 (suda 2011). Communities located outside of the greenbelt areas are not subject to planning coordination and restrictions. A Memorandum of Understanding between the Province and the Association of Municipalities of Ontario remains one of the few consultative mechanisms for discussing policy and regulatory changes, although the City of Toronto manages its relations outside of this agreement through the Toronto–Ontario Cooperation and Consultation Agreement (Kushner and Siegal 2003; Siegal 2004). Despite these agreements, however, policy coordination remains largely ineffective. This leaves a wide-open terrain for developers, with the Province doing little to control competition over business incentives and interlocal erosion of tax bases from the surrounding regions. Suburban municipalities in particular, meanwhile, continue to cling to an outdated model of development and the lucrative developmental fees and new property tax revenues that come along with it. In fact, some research suggests that land speculation and development have leapfrogged the greenbelt to the north, while prices south of the belt have risen as much of the land is owned by a small number of developers keen to take advantage of land supply constraints (Sanberg, Wekerele and Gilbert 2013).

The Great Recession’s Urban Implications

As the tailwinds of the Great Recession swept Ontario, the Ontario Liberal government ushered in a new era of austerity across the province. The major policy plank of this program was the Open Ontario Plan and the Open for Business Act, 2010, which called for tax relief, a wage freeze for public sector workers, the privatization of public assets and reforms to employment standards legislation (Evans and Albo 2010; Fanelli and Thomas 2011; Gellatly et al. 2011). These initiatives have placed new pressures on municipalities to extract concessions from workers and to reduce social services provisioning. Since 2010, the Liberals have limited expenditures to 2 percent growth, which, given inflation and population increases, continues the aggressive restraint measures that have been a hallmark of neoliberal government in Ontario since the 1990s. Furthermore, the 2010 budget deferred infrastructure spending to the tune of $2 billion, while corporate and personal income tax cuts are worth more than $4.6 billion over three years and an additional $1.6 billion through the elimination of the Ontario Capital Tax. These measures are in addition to a host of other tax cuts and corporate subsidies, amidst the general erosion of revenue capacities (Government of Ontario 2010; Mackenzie 2014).

Considering the crisis of infrastructure investment across Ontario municipalities, ongoing tax cuts by federal and provincial governments are destabilizing for Ontario municipalities. It is estimated that 82 percent of municipal infrastructure across Canada has been exhausted. More than half of all municipal roads are displaying advanced deterioration, 40 percent of pumping stations and storage tanks are in decline (with new federal water regulations expected to add some $25 billion over twenty years) and more than 30 percent of underground pipelines in need of replacement. Canadian municipalities now face an infrastructure deficit in the range of $125 billion, with combined provincial and federal infrastructural deficits more than double that amount (fcm 2006). As Figure 1 shows, Ontario municipalities face an infrastructure deficit upwards of $60 billion, nearly half of which is earmarked for roads and bridges, just to meet existing backlogs (amo 2012). The Association of Municipalities of Ontario notes that these estimates exclude parks and recreation, cultural centres, libraries and heritage facilities, all of which face added pressures for commercialization and privatization amidst declining municipal revenues. In addition, social housing has an estimated replacement cost of $40 billion, while an additional $50 billion is needed to expand public transit across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Areas over the next twenty-five years (amo 2012; Metrolinx 2008).

Slack, Tassonyi and Grad (2014) have charted the depreciation of capital stock by comparing the net value at acquisition with its current state. They found that municipal assets valued at $135 billion at the time of acquisition are now worth $93 billion, which suggests that, at a minimum, replacement costs for the thirty largest Ontario municipalities is around $42 billion. Because of uncontrolled development, infrastructure costs in the gta have been increasingly financed by debt as these municipalities try to deal with the cost of sprawl. For example, in the York Region, debt has grown from $319 per capita in 2000 to $1,792 per capita by 2012 (York Region 2013). Yet, much-needed maintenance and repair in urban areas is often being deferred in favour of expansion to ex-urban communities on the fringes (cmhc 1999; rccao 2010). As a consequence, pressures on Ontario municipalities to find cost savings continues to grow. This has included the use of user fees, contracting-out and new privatization initiatives, as well as a shift away from business property taxes; the expansion of density for benefit agreements (cash contributions or amenities from developers in return for allowing developers to exceed height and density restrictions); the leasing or selling of municipal property at below-fair-market value in order to attract new investments; new total or partial exemptions from levies, charges and/or municipal fees; interest-free or below-market-rate municipal loans for private capital; and the waiving, refund or exemption of development-related charges (Moussaoui 2013ab; Skaburskis and Tomalty 1997; Sheppard 2008; Moore 2013).

Reductions to employee compensation have also been a central aim of municipal austerity. However, while total employee compensation by the local government sector amounted to 5.8 percent of gdp in 1992, it has steadily declined since then, dropping to 4 percent of gdp in 2007. It increased as a share of gdp during the 2008–2010 recession as the underlying economy itself shrank, but has since declined to 4.2 percent of gdp in 2012 (a drop of 26 percent since 1992) (Statistics Canada 2013d, 2013e). Average weekly wages paid by municipal and regional governments rose from $622.67 in 1992 to $952.86 in 2012, a compound annual increase of 2 percent a year. This works out to annual pay of $49,549 in 2012. However, average pay for those paid by the hour at the local government level was considerably lower, averaging roughly $40,000 in 2012. In comparison, overall average weekly earnings increased at an annual average rate of 2.3 percent since 1992, rising to $871 weekly and $45,292 annually in 2012. Since 2000, local government wages have also increased at a slower annual rate than the overall average (2.5 percent versus 2.9 percent) (Statistics Canada 2013e). Thus, efforts to reduce municipal workers’ compensation stem not from overgenerous pay or out-of-control municipal finances, but rather reflect an elite-driven political project that seeks to harmonize downwards the wages and working conditions of municipal workers across the labour market.

Austerity-Lite: Collective Bargaining at City Hall

The persistence of neoliberalism in Toronto, despite a so-called progressive coalition governing at City Hall and new cooperation with labour and urban social movements during the Miller era, raises important questions about extra-local political pressures and economic constraints that cannot be resolved by city government. It also raises issues of how local “progressive” coalitions come to reinforce these neoliberal constraints, rather than build an empowering politics and new political capacities to challenge them. In particular, the problem is how these “progressive” political coalitions have come to demand, and actively seek to impose, discipline from workers and unions to cope with local fiscal and political constraints while the demands of the capitalist and professional classes are accommodated and incorporated in urban policies. How, then, did Council rationalize going after workers’ wages? In what ways did cupe Locals 79 and 416 respond to such attacks? And what are some lessons that might be learned in the continued struggle against concessions?

Because Local 79 is the largest municipal union in Canada, reforms that are implemented in Toronto have implications for other cities and other public sector workers because they often set the bar for other jurisdictions to follow. In the case of the 2009 round of bargaining, four issues were central: (1) defending attacks against the controversial Sick Leave Benefit Program (slbp), which allowed for the banking of sick days; (2) staving off attempts to erode job security provisions, seniority rights and transfer and promotional opportunities; (3) challenging a freeze on cost-of-living increases to wages as well as the implementation of two-tiered wages; and (4) curtailing attempts by management to contract-out employment and increase control over the labour process through enhanced disciplinary and surveillance measures.

Throughout bargaining, the economic fallout from the Great Recession served as a political and economic pretext justifying the City’s hard line against its civic workers. Mayor Miller argued that the world had changed and that the City needed to cut back on its labour costs and come to terms with the realities of the new economy. For Local 79, it was a matter of equity and fairness to continue the wage pattern in settlements set with other city unions. This included resisting efforts to eliminate the slbp and their banking toward a severance payment upon retirement, opposing concessionary demands and rejecting attempts to privatize public services. The union was essentially trying to hold on to what they already had, and they made no new demands during bargaining.

Despite bargaining from January to June 2009 without a contract, Local 79’s executive gave little indication, publically or at membership meetings, of just how far apart the two sides were. With hours remaining before the strike deadline, the Local 79 executive haphazardly put together a strike-coordinating team. The Local leadership not only failed to pre-emptively mobilize its members, but also did not engage other workers or community members in Toronto with any political or educational campaigns. In the lead-up to the strike, Local 79’s leadership made very little effort to publically make the connection between communities, public sector jobs and services or why it was important to support workers defending decent employment conditions and wages. On June 22, 2009, cupe Locals 79 and 416 launched the largest municipal strike in Canadian history. Many union members presumed that the “progressive coalition” at City Hall would come through for the civic unions that had backed Mayor Miller’s election campaign so forcefully. On the day that the union called the strike many workers showed up to work surprised to learn of the labour conflict. Many of the 24,000 striking workers simply did not know where to go or what to do. Picketing sites were unknown, where and how to register for picket duties was unspecified, picket captains had not been trained, and there were few informational materials for members. The union website was not updated until days into the strike and proved little use for members to discuss issues or get new information.

Local 79 was unprepared strategically and tactically, as well as politically, in important ways. There was a lack of experienced organizers leading the strike. The Local president had never been an organizer of a Local 79 strike nor had most of the current members of the executive committee. Moreover, union organizers were not booked off as full-time organizers until right before the strike was set to start, resulting in a disorganized and unprepared executive that trickled down to the rest of the membership. Third, financial and personnel resources were allocated in ineffective and inequitable ways across the city’s regional strike offices. For example, despite the fact that Toronto is one of the most expensive cities to live in, no hardship fund was set up as the strike went on, strike pay coordination was initiated only after the strike had already begun and personnel with no experience with waste collection were tasked with picket line duty at dump sites. Perhaps most problematically, the Local 79 bargaining committee — having failed to inform and mobilize the general membership from the bottom up — proceeded largely independent of the rest of the membership. As a result, by the end of the first week on strike many members experienced a lack of solidarity in the face of mounting public resentment, including feelings of isolation and disconnect not only amongst the union membership but across the general public as well. This was reflected in low morale on the picket lines, an unawareness of the key issues involved in negotiations and public vitriol directed at workers across picket lines.

There were, of course, exceptions. Some experienced activists with a commitment to the membership and a strong sense of social justice sought to consistently provide information to picketers, boost morale and historicize strike actions. On some picket lines a real sense of union solidarity was created and nurtured as workers united and the antagonism between workers and the employer became clearer. Many also began raising difficult questions about the practices of the City and the union, and about administrative and revenue issues related to Toronto’s finances. During the strike, members of many other union locals and community activists also showed their solidarity with striking city workers in the form of strike support barbeques, newsletters and public rallies. But these examples were the exceptions. Beyond administrative assistance and minor input in decision-making processes, cupe National played a very limited role in the broader coordination of bargaining despite the fact that this could have established the pattern of bargaining across cupe’s other 250 municipal Locals across Canada. This raises a set of issues that are related to cupe National’s fragmented approach to bargaining and enduring tensions related to national leadership and local autonomy. These questions are themselves enmeshed within broader debates about the structure of cupe and its affiliates, its social and political priorities, organizational emphasis and strategic outlook (Ross 2005).

The lack of concerted mobilizational efforts, little to no media attention for pro-strike voices and an inability to link workers’ struggles with the broader attack on public services limited strikers’ traction with the general public. It was also clear that Toronto’s broadly defined coalition of progressive forces both inside and outside of Toronto’s unions was unable to mobilize in an effective way around the strike. In contrast, right-wing critics had a field day blaming so-called selfish unionized workers. Sue-Ann Levy, for instance, writing in the Toronto Sun, wrote that “socialist Silly Hall” has good reason to “stand up to cupe’s greedy demands for a continued overly generous sick leave plan and unrealistic pay hikes, especially during these hard times.” In a bevy of articles low on evidence and high on exaggerated rhetoric, she pointed to garbage piling up on the streets and criticized Mayor Miller’s hesitation to legislate a contract and force significant worker concessions and pay cuts (Levy 2009a, 2009b, 2011). Likewise, Charlie Gillis and Kate Lunau (2009) of Macleans wrote of companies fleeing the City’s “tax and spend ways,” as “the festering trash is just another sign that the city’s high hopes are being held ransom by out-of-control costs.”

Unexpectedly, after thirty-nine days on strike, both Locals reached an agreement. Economically, both Locals 79 and 416 managed to fight off demands to freeze wages, institute a multi-tiered wage system and limit seniority-based promotion. The banking of sick days and cash payouts was replaced with a short-term disability plan for new hires. Current workers were able to cash out their accumulated sick bank and switch to the short-term plan or keep their existing plan. Locals 79 and 416 were successful in gaining 2 percent raises over three years. Local 79 part-timers, however, did not see any extension of benefits nor do they have a sick plan. The other concessions were taken off the table. The economic gains of the strike, however, were little more than a short-term, if hollow achievement. In fact, the political implications of the strike outlived the minor and largely temporary economic benefits of the agreement. The strike was a political failure when it came to mobilizing sustained action and education, garnering public support and linking the defence of unionized workplaces with fighting for workers in non-unionized jobs, the underemployed and unemployed. Furthermore, the agreement did not make work any less precarious, particularly for part-timers. With some political imagination the strike may have been strategically situated in relation to a number of related issues such as public services and privatization, taxation and revenue generation, as well as mounting precarious work and poverty in the Toronto area. While the strike was not an absolute failure, illusions about the strike being a victory only served to politically disarm workers in the face of ongoing demands for concessions, which paved the way for future defeats.

From Miller Time to Ford Nation: Austerity Urbanism Intensified

Following on the heels of the strike, Council implemented a 5 percent target of reduction to all departmental expenditures. Council also moved forward with both new tax and fee hikes and further cuts in services: water rates rose 9 percent, property taxes by 4 percent (having increased 12 percent since 2005) and the renting of City-run facilities and recreational programs by 4 percent. The 2009 strike by Toronto civic workers ended in the midst of the Great Recession, with little more than one year to go before the next municipal election. In this sense, the 2009 strike served as a political lightning rod in the run-up to the next election as the recession evolved. By early 2010 Mayor Miller had indicated that he would not seek re-election. On October 25, 2010, the most fiscally conservative councillor in the previous term, Rob Ford, and son of former Mike Harris-era Conservative backbencher, Doug Ford Sr., was elected the new mayor of Toronto. Throughout his campaign, Mayor Ford used the 2009 strike to direct public anger and frustration toward so-called lavish union wages and wasteful City spending (Kohler 2010a, 2010b). Indicative of a shift in the centre of political gravity at City Hall, the “progressive wing” was replaced with a majority conservative council which all but swept suburban wards (Saberi and Kipfer 2010; Kipfer 2010). Toronto’s centre–left forces failed to hold support, while various labour and community groups failed to organize in an effective manner against the rise of right-wing populism (Albo 2009). Much like former Ontario Premier Mike Harris’s political platform of the mid-1990s that drove the provincial turn to neoliberalism after the failures of the prior “progressive” New Democratic government, Rob Ford took advantage of a similar political environment in Toronto.

Ford stuck to easily absorbable talking points — tax cuts, less government, less unions, more business investment — and rode to power deriding the alleged waste and inefficiency that prevailed at City Hall (Kohler 2010a, 2010b). In the vitriolic rhetoric that characterized his campaign, Ford vowed to put an end to the “gravy train”:

During his mayoral bid, Mr. Ford tapped into the wellspring of resentment over that strike [2009 civic workers’ strike] to propel himself to victory, and he and other supporters of privatization raised the spectre of it several times … While the day brought some compromise, the Mayor worked from the onset to draw a sharp ideological line among Council members, characterizing his critics as “tax-and-spend socialists.” “We are going to divide ourselves up into two groups,” he said. “This is going to be very simple for the taxpayers to see.” (Church and White 2011)

Dubbing his supporters “Ford Nation,” he contended that Toronto had become a fiefdom for powerful, monopolistic and uncompetitive unions and pledged that he would stand up to Toronto’s unions, privatize assets, contract-out services and reduce taxes. Little more than a year into his term, a number of initiatives from Ford’s campaign platform were implemented. These included eliminating the $60 vehicle registration fee; freezing property taxes for 2011; cutting councillors’ expense budgets from $53,000 to $30,000; reducing funding for libraries; eliminating Toronto Transit Commission (ttc) bus routes and scrapping the Miller-era Transit City plan that called for the construction of seven new light rail lines along the streets of seven priority transit corridors; having the ttc declared an essential service by the Province and removing the right to strike for transit workers; selling off twenty-two community housing units; listing the Toronto Zoo and three City-owned theatres for sale; and contracting-out a portion of Toronto’s garbage collection.

With the support of allies on Council, departmental budgets were also cut by 10 percent (or $360 million), while user fees for rentals and recreation and arts programs increased by 3 percent on average (City of Toronto 2011). Ford was unapologetic in arguing that “the gravy is in the number of employees we have at City Hall” (Dale 2011b). While Ford vowed to reduce the city’s workforce by seven thousand, partly through his term Toronto’s municipal workforce had already been reduced by two thousand workers (a $140 million cut), mostly from leaving vacancies unfilled (Maloney 2011b). It is clear that the crisis and the drive to austerity hardened neoliberalism in Toronto. Through his term, Ford continued to push for privatizing as much as possible using the rationale that Toronto’s fiscal woes stem from a “spending problem.” In financing his first year in support of a balanced operating budget for 2011, Ford used $330 million of the surplus left over by former Mayor Miller, froze property taxes (despite being one of the lowest in the gta) and ttc fares and introduced over $23 million in new user fees (Maloney 2011a; City of Toronto 2011; tea/ttc Riders 2011).

Despite the changes, Ford’s promise of neither increasing taxes nor cutting services was utter electoral fantasy. This was most clearly evident in Mayor Rob Ford’s campaign pledge to remove Toronto’s Land Transfer Tax, which is a surcharge on any buildings, future construction projects and land fixtures. The Land Transfer Tax is based on the amount paid for the land. The first $55,000 is charged at 0.5 percent, $55,000 to $400,000 at 1.0 percent and over $400,000 at 2 percent. Since this brought in some $300 million in revenue in 2011, it is hard to imagine how such an important revenue stream could be replaced. Ford’s budgetary plans, based as they were on radical budgetary cuts and one-time fiscal injections, sought to turn public assets and services into profitable outlets for the private sector. The purpose of these neoliberal budgetary policies is to transform the nature of government, bolster capitalist profits and cheapen labour costs. For example, Ford’s first major stab at privatizing Toronto’s public services easily passed when City Council voted to contract-out a portion of the city’s garbage collection, potentially laying off upwards of three hundred Local 416 workers (Ridler and Maloney 2011). In addition to outsourcing garbage collection, the plan increases the number of Litter Vac Operations conducted by private contractors from twelve to twenty-nine, contracts out Litter Bin collection within city parks and supplements curbside residential waste collection by private contractors on a call-out basis (tea 2011; Rosen and Associates 2011).

In 2011, Ford and a $3 million team of “gravy sniffing” consultants undertook the six-month Core Services Review, which sought to dramatically increase the scope of private sector provisioning of services (Rider 2011). The City also undertook a “service efficiency study” to find improvements in economic performance, as well as a user-fee review exploring whether the City could raise more than one thousand different fees it collects to the tune of $1.4 billion (Ridler 2011). Throughout his entire political career, Ford argued for turning public goods and services into profitable investments for the private sector. The kpmg Core Services Review aimed to provide the political and ideological rationale for such an undertaking. The reports put forward a catalogue of suggested cuts to the City’s budget (kpmg 2011), which included:

• Eliminating or reducing: emergency funds to help the elderly and disabled purchase emergency medical supplies; subsidized recreational activities for low-income earners and children; a program that distributes Christmas gifts to needy children; a hardship fund that subsidizes funeral costs for poor residents; the City’s “very aggressive” recycling target rate of 70 percent diversion from land fill sites; Toxic Taxi hazardous waste disposal service; Community Environment Days; public library branches and hours of operation; horticultural activities, particularly those “aesthetic in nature”; Urban Agriculture Services, small zoos and farm attractions; Toronto Environment Office and Toronto Atmospheric Fund which does research, dispenses grants and offers programs to encourage ecologically sustainable cities; cat and dog licensing; some healthcare programs (e.g., aids prevention, dental health and student nutrition); parts of the ttc’s late night and weekend bus routes;

• Contracting-out, new user-fees and asset sales: windrow (large piles of snow) removal, street sweepers, snow clearing, de-icing, grass cutting and park maintenance; four free garbage tags program; water fluoridation; limiting payroll runs; adding new fees for providing information to the public and filing applications (e.g., increased permit and application fees, rental usage.). Lowering the service delivery targets to “standard service levels” (i.e., basic provincially mandated services);

• Outsourcing or privatizing: residential solid waste, including the elimination of small commercial waste collection; waste diversion enforcement; old-age homes; childcare, particularly 2000 formerly provincially subsidized spaces; inspection of childcare services; integrating ems and fire services; inter-hospital transfers by ambulance; 311 activities; administrative services; recreational programming and activities; public arts and cultural programming; some ttc routes, as well as Wheel Trans handicapped services; Exhibition Place; Toronto Zoo; Enwave; off-street parking lots; and City-owned theatres.

The kpmg reports, however, do not uncover any real savings in the sense of efficiencies in delivering the same level of services. All the so-called savings come at the cost of cutting service levels and access to city services, one-time asset sales and presumed lower wages of private sector workers. This has been a recurrent consequence of the neoliberal public administration that kpmg advocates in which they gain by first advocating the cuts and then coming in to help administer the services just cut and privatized. In the end, the Core Services Review revealed no fat, instead it actually demonstrated just how efficiently the city was being run (Hume 2011; James 2011; Selley 2011). In an effort to further meet its aggressive reductions targets, the Ford administration also announced it would be offering some fifty thousand workers a buyout package (White 2011). Through Ford’s term, much headway was made in the commercialization and privatization of city services apart from the Core Services Review. Toronto Council, for instance, passed a new initiative that sells advertising space on the city’s transit system, including naming rights for subway lines and stations, expecting it to generate $324 million over twelve years.

Of course, urban fiscal challenges are not imaginary. They are the result of both political decisions and economic factors. In this regard, the problems of Toronto’s current budgetary impasse are not unique to the Ford administration. But Ford’s own contribution to its making is not without important political economic implications. The budget could have been immediately offset if Council reversed some of the revenue stream cuts Ford made in coming into office, or raised property taxes in order to keep up with inflation. Despite the Ford administration’s own contribution to exacerbating the City of Toronto’s so-called fiscal crisis, the fact remains that more substantive tripartite funding arrangements and independent fiscal measures are required to address the city’s revenue problem. The Miller-era Independent Fiscal Review Panel in some ways sought to kickstart such discussions, addressing the structural problems of funding Canadian cities. Panel members suggested that Canadian municipalities needed new revenue tools to improve funding for cities, particularly for large urban centres like Toronto. The key difference between Miller’s Fiscal Review Panel and Ford’s Core Services Review, however, is that while the former acknowledged decades of provincial and federal downloading without matching fiscal supports, the latter only sought to cut services and increase the use of private sector delivery models. The Fiscal Review Panel argued that a national municipal strategy was needed, particularly for infrastructure, water, waste, sewage and transit systems. The Core Services Review, on the other hand, ignored the long-term picture by focusing only on immediate cuts rather than deficiencies in revenue transfers and local governance autonomy.

The Ford administration sought to undermine public sector unionism in Toronto precisely because Toronto has been and remains one of the centres of North American unionism and class struggle (Kealey 1995; Tufts 2004, 2007). And because cupe Local 79 is one of the largest and historically militant unions in Canada, extracting concessions would signal an open season for other municipalities and tiers of government. This is why Ford was so aggressive with respect to layoffs, cuts in services, selling off assets and so forth. He had the support of Toronto’s and Canada’s elites, who are driving this agenda in the private sector. Although the Core Services Review did little to find new efficiencies — it did, in fact, do the opposite, showing how Toronto is already one of the leanest-run municipalities in Canada — the ability of future governments to take a hardline posture with respect to workplace concessions will determine whether Conservatives can consolidate their hold on Council over the long term.

Chapter Five

Concessionary Bargaining in Conservative Toronto, 2012–2014

Since 2008, austerity measures have dominated both the federal and provincial scales of governance as illustrated by public services retrenchment and labour strife. The Commission on the Reform of Ontario’s Public Services, headed by former TD Bank chief economist, Don Drummond, put forward a series of proposed cuts to public services, most premised on lower service levels and private sector initiatives to fill existing voids. The Drummond Commission, as it was called, argued that without new forms of revenue generation (their mandate explicitly prevented them from exploring these options), program spending will need to be cut “more deeply on a real per capita basis, and over a much longer period of time, than the Harris government did in the 1990s” (Commision on the Reform of Ontario’s Public Services 2012: 10). The Drummond Commission report has been criticized for its alarmist projections and “lack of evidence or data to support its recommendations” (ocufa 2012: 1–2). Others have roundly criticized the report for its flawed methodology, accounting oversights, exaggerated spending increases, overemphasis on government spending and for being constrained by the policies of neoliberalism (Noonen 2012; Mackenzie 2014).

While the 2010–12 Ontario budgets called for limiting growth in expenditures to 2 percent, continuing the aggressive restraint measures first enacted in 2008, the 2013–14 budget called for holding annual expenditure growth to 1.5 percent. Given inflation and population growth, such a limit is actually a significant decline in real per capita spending. What’s more, the Liberals’ austerity agenda is back-end loaded with each year of restraint being more aggressive than the last. By 2016–17, as the final year of the government’s fiscal plan shows, Ontario will have to freeze program spending and then cut spending by an additional 1 percent in 2017–18 in order to meet its stated goal of budget surpluses for which few details have been provided (Government of Ontario 2013). As others have shown, these reductions to public spending are not an economic necessity but rather a political imperative as Ontario’s budgetary deficit is on track to surplus without the additional austerity targets (Mackenzie 2014). The Drummond Commission also recommended reducing support for the municipal sector by delaying the uploading of services, with the Liberals not giving a clear direction on whether or not they will maintain the current schedule. In 2013, the City of Toronto received $150 million from the Province as compensation for the loss of social services funding, which is expected to wind down by 2016. The eventual expiry of federal housing agreements linked to social housing mortgages will also result in a reduction of $175 million in transfers per year by 2032.

The Mayor Ford era at City Hall was dominated by an explicitly neoliberal policy paradigm premised on turning valuable public assets over to the private sector, along with consequent reductions to public services and increased precarity of job tenure for municipal employees. These measures, for Ford and like-minded councillors, are presented to the public as “efficiencies” (Vincent 2011). 2012 began no differently, with Ford and aligned councillors reasserting their vow to sell 706 subsidized housing units, open up the city’s daycares (the country’s second largest with 24,000 subsidized spots) and nursing homes to public-private delivery models, as well as putting hundreds of parcels of land up for sale (Dale 2011a; James 2011). Additional plans included selling off Toronto Community Housing Corporation (worth $6 billion in housing stock), which would effect roughly 164,000 tenants; contracting-out Wheel-Trans public transit for special needs riders; scrapping the City’s Fair Wage policy; and privatizing the remaining portions of Toronto’s waste disposal services. In late 2012, City Council voted to sell the City’s 43 percent stake in deep-lake water-cooling company Enwave. Toronto finance staffers had estimated the sale to gross between $120 and $170 million, although the sale to Brookfield Asset Management eventually grossed $100 million, which was used to finance the City’s capital budget. As the first round of collective bargaining since the acrimonious 2009 strike and first as mayor for Ford, the 2012 round of negotiations served as a litmus test for both the City of Toronto and Locals 79 and 416 in a battle that would have significant consequences for the delivery of public services and the working conditions of city staff.

If the City was able to extract a host of concessions from the unions, this would signal an open attack across municipalities and the broader public sector. On the other hand, if Locals 79 and 416 not only managed to hold off concessionary demands, but actually extended some benefits to those most precariously employed and tied those gains to the community groups they served, it might have sparked a push back in the public sector, serving as an example for other unions and community groups at large. Unfortunately, the outcome of the 2012 round of collective bargaining tended toward the former scenario, likely serving as a template for other municipalities across Canada.

Labour Strife: Union Negotiations in 2012

Under the leadership of authoritarian populist Mayor Rob Ford (Kipfer and Saberi 2014), it was clear from the beginning that the City’s negotiating team would be taking a hard-line position during negotiations. Having made significant inroads to concessions during the 2009 round of bargaining, the City used the unpopularity of the previous strike as an opportunity to further extend their mandate of austerity and attacks against workers. The Employee and Labour Relations Committee (elrc), a subcommittee of mostly conservative councillors handpicked by the mayor, was responsible for negotiating with the unions’ various bargaining committees. The elrc did not need the approval of Council to lock out workers or unilaterally alter the terms of the contract. Locals 79 and 416’s collective agreements were set to expire on January 1, 2012. But by October 2011 the City had already served notice to Local 416 to begin bargaining. This formed part of the City’s broader orchestration to thoroughly defeat what remained of trade union militancy in Locals 79 and 416.

While talks had started months earlier, by mid-December 2011 both the City and Local 416 were accusing each other of bargaining in the media. However, by this point the City had already requested a conciliator as mandated by law. Just three days into the new year, the City of Toronto informed the Ministry of Labour that bargaining had reached an impasse. Two issues were crucial at this juncture. First, upon receipt of the City’s request, the Ministry of Labour could issue a “no board” report, which meant that after a period of seventeen days the City could lock out workers, unilaterally impose conditions or the union could strike. Second, the City used the time in between the issuance of a “no board” and a deadline as an opportunity to bargain publicly, intimidating workers into accepting the terms of a new agreement. Rather than threatening a lockout, the elrc argued that unless the terms of a new agreement were accepted, they would simply be imposed. In order to meet the challenges of a “cash-strapped city,” argued councillors and media pundits, workers would need to concede wages and benefits and, most of all, job security.

While negotiations faltered, on January 13, 2012, Local 416 held a press conference to try to sway public support. The union’s announcement was straightforward. In return for rolling over the existing contract, the union would forego wage increases for the duration of the contract. A moratorium on wage increases would translate into approximately $10 million in yearly savings. Local 416 also made the case that public sector workers should not be made to pay for an economic crisis not of their making. But the City immediately rejected what representatives of the elrc deemed a public relations ploy, stressing that what was central in this round of bargaining was employer “flexibility” not wage concerns. In this regard, the recasting of working people and job security as outmoded entitlements has been one of the great successes of neoliberalism.

Despite Local 416’s very public play, the City continued to push for the complete removal of a no-contracting-out clause that required workers whose jobs were eliminated or technologically displaced to be re-deployed to another position. Additionally, the City was seeking reductions to health and dental benefits as well as the termination of a clause that required the City to collect dues for the union. For accepting these so-called productivity-enhancing amendments, the City would give workers a lump sum payment of 1.5 percent of an employee’s base salary. The City later sweetened the pot by offering job security to those with at least twenty-five years of seniority, while the union moved from a position of no-concessions bargaining to job security for those with five years of experience. Clearly, this was a divisive strategy on the part of the City intended to create a row between newer and older workers. While the City continued to bargain with Local 416, Local 79 was focused on replacing its outgoing president and executive council, playing a minor role as Local 416 continued to bargain. On January 18, 2012, a “no board” report had been issued, which meant that a February 5th deadline had been set. The City continued to publicly stress that unless the union gave up “jobs for life,” an agreement would be imposed. This was framed in terms of increasing innovation, efficiency, flexibility and saving “taxpayers’” money and balancing “managerial rights” (Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday in Dale and Boyle 2012). Members of the elrc argued that public sector labour contracts must fall in line with the private sector. The City and union bargained past the deadline, reaching an agreement on February 13th.

Four terms of the agreement are central. First, the new agreement includes language that allows the City to unilaterally make any changes to shift schedules so long as employees are served notice. Annual job performance evaluations are now used to determine shifts and scheduling. This was a concession the City tried to force in 2002, 2005 and 2009, as the previous contract required that the worker and union agree to any shift/scheduling changes. Second, the new contract removes a letter of agreement that provided protection to all permanent employees regarding contracting-out or technological displacement. Under the new agreement, the threshold of protection was reduced from covering all workers to only those with at least fifteen years of seniority (a decrease of coverage from 100 to about 68 percent of employees). This had been a hallmark of previous rounds of bargaining. Third, the City reduced the amount of coverage for health and dental benefits, which, according to the terms of the new agreement, is expected to save the City some $20 to $35 million, and also eliminated expected post-retirement liabilities of $54 million. Fourth, in return for giving up a significant portion of their job security, workers received a one-time bonus of 1.5 percent, 0 percent in 2012, 0.5 percent in 2013, 1.75 percent in 2014 and 2.25 in 2015. A remaining issue left on the table was that related to reducing workplace absenteeism. Both the union and the City have agreed to study the matter further in what will likely be a major point of contention in the next round of bargaining.

With Local 416 having set the bar, the agreement was essentially rolled over to Local 79, which put it up for a vote without recommendation. Of Local 79’s four bargaining units, two units (Full-time and Part-Time Unit B) voted to accept the deal as is, but recreational part-time workers voted the deal down. The City and Local 79 went back to bargaining and were able to obtain some minor changes that increased the amount of hours an employee is allowed to work in a particular position and included a new provision stipulating paid time off for mandatory re-certification (e.g., cpr training). A fourth unit representing part-time employees of long-term care homes and services facilities also rejected some aspects of the new agreement due to a reduction of work hours and ongoing scheduling conflicts, but that dispute was sent to binding arbitration as these workers are deemed “essential.” As the experiences of labour history generally and Local 79 in particular have shown, small concessions beget larger concessions and unless workers are prepared to take job action, they will be hard pressed to resist demands for future concessions. Unfortunately, while the City of Toronto may have drawn important lessons from the experiences of 2009, Locals 79 and 416 seem to be undergoing a slow-motion death by a thousand cuts. In other words, Locals 79 and 416 continue to travel down a road paved with concessions without a cohesive strategy or political pushback to counter austerity urbanism.

Municipal Labour’s Last Gasp or Comeback?

The centre of gravity in the Canadian labour movement has gradually shifted since the 1980s from predominantly “blue-collar” private sector workers to one increasingly centred in the public sector and female led. With some 70 percent of the public sector still unionized, compared to about 16 percent in the private sector, the attacks on public sector unionism threaten to consolidate the defeat of organized labour. In light of the string of concessions for Locals 79 and 416, it was clear that the City of Toronto had drawn important lessons from past collective bargaining experiences. Equally important, it was evident the City, unlike the union, was thinking in broader class terms. With more than 250 cupe locals bargaining across Canada, municipalities and anti-tax crusaders were watching closely as the experiences of Toronto served as a template for other jurisdictions preparing to take on their public sector workers. “Municipalities will pay attention to what’s happening here,” argued Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday. “[This round of bargaining is] the defining experience in our city’s recent history,” he added. “It [attempts to impose a contract] hasn’t been done [in the public sector],” added Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, “No one else had the balls” (Ridler 2012; Grant 2012). In place of labour radicalism, then, it has been state militancy that has seized the moment and adapted to the conditions of recession and austerity. As one executive member of Local 79’s bargaining committee put it, unions have not adapted to the conditions of the twenty-first century, which require a new radicalized approach: “Now I know what it feels like to be an autoworker.” Indeed, in an ambitious strategy more than a year in the making, the City undertook a number of strategic and tactical initiatives that left the unions scrambling to keep up.

In order to avoid summer bargaining (and potentially a summer strike with garbage once again lining the streets), the City served notice to Local 416 to begin bargaining months in advance of the contract expiring. As part of the strategy, the aim was to divide and separate locals from one another, especially the largest, Local 79, whose contracts expired around the same time. A lack of coordination among cupe locals was compounded because Local 79 was in the process of electing a new president and executive. Had unions bargaining with the City sought to strategize collectively, Local 79, or the other two cupe locals bargaining, 4948 (library workers) and 2998 (Association of Community Centres and University Settlement House Workers) for example, could have served notice to begin bargaining earlier and put management in the hot seat, but they did not, which may have been a significant strategic mistake.

The City put together an aggressive negotiating team stacked with management firm lawyers with vast amounts of experience extracting concessions from unionized workers. This assisted the City in successfully establishing the tone of bargaining early as they developed contingency plans well in advance of contracts expiring. They also took the lead in establishing the public relations tone early, with councillors releasing memoranda from meetings with union reps to journalists and making frequent interventions in print, on radio and on television. As Globe and Mail columnist Kelly Grant (2012) put it: “As Canadian jurisdictions prepare to take on public-sector unions in a new age of austerity … the city’s plan worked and now other municipalities across the country are looking at replicating the Toronto model.”

Importantly, rather than lock out workers, the City of Toronto threatened to unilaterally impose contracts and alter the terms of employment. This was an unprecedented effort by a Canadian municipality, although it shares precedents with moves first undertaken in the U.S. industrial sector and later deployed by various levels of government (Fletcher and Gapasin 2008; Moody 1997). In Canada, this tactic was brought to light in Ontario when college administrators threatened to unilaterally impose the terms of the agreement unless unionized instructors accepted concessions in 2009–2010. After forcing a contract on instructors, just 51 percent of the union accepted the agreement (cbc 2010). In a similar fashion, unless cupe locals accepted the terms of the agreement, the City made clear it would simply implement their final offer. The union could then either strike completely, implement rotating strikes, work-to-rule or choose to continue bargaining with the City. Its legality, however, has not been established in the Canadian public sector.

In the event of a strike the City was prepared to implement a six-month contingency plan, which they did not have in 2009. The City was prepared to install hundreds of cameras at different picket sites and implement a waste management plan that would establish trash drop-off sites at yards and arena parking lots rather than city parks. Collectively, these strategies worked brilliantly to stifle, undermine and get the better of Locals 79 and 416. It also makes clear the limitations of cupe’s, the locals’ and the Toronto and York Region Labour Council’s singular focus on lobbying individual councillors. Councillors’ first priority is to get re-elected and, as the 2009 round of bargaining with a labour-friendly social-democratic mayor and progressive council showed, individual councillor support often hinges on broader public opinion. In light of recurring concessions, the question then is: what is cupe as a union and, specifically, Locals 79 and 416 prepared to do?

In Defence of the Public Sector: Some Thoughts on Strategy Moving Forward

Considering the concerted attacks against labour, should unions wish to regain their once-prominent role in the pursuit of social justice and workplace democracy, they will need to take the risks of organizing working-class communities and fighting back while they still have some capacity to do so or risk continuing the decades-long labour impasse and union decline. This requires a radicalized perspective that seeks to develop both alternative policies and an alternative politics rooted in a class-oriented unionism. It is a well-known truism that exclusion from the benefits of unionization often builds resentment among non-union workers, which has been made more intense in the neoliberalized landscape where the social welfare state has been dismantled. Genuine labour–community engagement requires taking stock of this dismantling and how badly and disproportionately it is affecting poor people and marginalized communities. Rebuilding unions and renewing working-class politics must engage directly with this resentment if it is to counter the drumbeats of austerity and retrenchment that have been a trademark since the global financial crisis.

Through 2013 and 2014, Rob Ford was mired in many personal and political controversies: allegations of sexual harassment; public drunkenness; video recordings of racist, homophobic and misogynist language; allegations, denials and subsequent admission of crack cocaine use; a City audit that found he had exceeded election campaign spending limits; a verdict in an Ontario court of law that found him guilty of breaking provincial conflict of interest laws, which was subsequently overturned under much controversy; and the defection of a handful of chief of staff, communication and press secretaries amidst mounting controversies (Doolittle 2014). The right-wing populism and prevailing Ford mythology in popular consciousness has been written about extensively by others (Kipfer and Saberi 2014). Despite the cascading series of controversies for Ford, austerity measures have become common sense at City Hall.

Future contract negotiations with Locals 79 and 416, which represent some 60 percent of civic workers proper, will reveal whether conservatives can consolidate their hold over Council, or whether or not the Toronto labour movement as a whole is up to the task of fighting back and mounting a campaign protecting vital public services. In the absence of such a fight back, future city councils, with the support of Toronto’s and Canada’s ruling classes, will continue to be forceful with respect to layoffs, service cuts, asset sell-offs and attacks against labour. This setting requires an alternative political/labour strategy, in particular for cupe Locals 79 and 416, given the harsh fact that the economic crisis has so far strengthened reactionary forces and efforts to reconstruct neoliberal policy frameworks. Such rethinking has implications for unions and community activists as a whole.

Previous strikes by Locals 79 and 416 have made it painfully clear that the locals cannot go into bargaining alone. Even with the support of cupe National, community groups, social justice activists and other unions, the mobilizational capacities, resources, organization and community and political support were not sufficient. As one activist member of Local 79 put it in 2014:

The new leadership is doing a much better job with outreach and advocacy, but it is not enough. What’s worse, if federal legislation like allowing secret ballots during strikes, banning the use of dues for so-called political purposes, requiring increased financial disclosure by unions, removal of the rand formula, and right-to-work legislation passes, cupe could lose up to 20 percent of its membership. In Ontario we’re in serious trouble … as if it wasn’t already bad enough! We’re talking about the survival of collective bargaining here.

Transforming unions internally and solidifying their relationships to others affected by the concerted push for austerity means not only building on the successes of earlier struggles but also confronting the shortcomings of previous strategies. Calls for solidarity without substance is mere posturing, just as militancy for militancy’s sake is reactionary and might well pave the way for future defeats. The challenge confronting Locals 79 and 416 and other unionized workers is to take the necessary steps in order to avoid sounding militant but then reproducing the status quo.

In other words, issues around rank-and-file mobilization, education, sustaining engagement and deepening coalitions beyond defensive struggles are central to (re)building workers’ political and organizational capacities. While strikes can be explosions of class consciousness, the working-class solidarity they generate rarely gathers momentum beyond the immediate event (Mann 1973). Hence, while strikes may lead workers to question the unequal relationship between employers and employees, those concerns rarely translate into a politically coherent awareness of class differences and class struggles. Militancy alone rarely accomplishes much beyond spontaneous bursts of discontent and may well be constrained by workplace particularism. As others have noted, bursts of “militant particularism” might fizzle just as quickly as they erupted (Williams 1989; Mann 1973; Harvey 1996). While strikes are certainly important and can go a long way toward galvanizing broader community support in defence of decent jobs, the challenge is to connect these seemingly particular or localized concerns to a broader political project that makes clear the relationship between individual and structural forms of oppression. As elucidated by Harvey (1996), the paradox of militant particularism is that it often develops amongst one group of workers at the expense of workers elsewhere, stifling a more universal working class, socialistic consciousness and movement across space or particular locales. Moderating expectations and seeking to arrive at an equal partnership with so-called responsible politicians and businesses in the hope that labour will gain a seat at the table has been proven time and again to be a fool’s errand.

As part of dealing with past failures, cupe Locals 79 and 416 must come to the realization that the existing way of doing things simply is not working. Although a product of historical differentiation among blue-collar/outside and white-collar/inside workers, cupe Locals 79 and 416 will need to seriously consider merging and doing away with what are otherwise arbitrary and eroding distinctions between its workers. Their independent and collective futures depend on it. Many of the positions of cupe Locals 79 and 416’s workers often intersect, are co-dependent and take place in the same location. Additionally, the terms of one Local’s contract often sets the terms of pattern bargaining for other locals, so they have a vested interest in one another just as they do with other unionized city workers (for example, library workers and Toronto Hydro). Confronting austerity means rethinking sectional divisions among unionized workers. As a public strategy, the issues of bargaining and keeping services and assets public should be at the centre of the unions’ demands. This message might help to reveal linkages between the users and producers of services in the context of eroding social services provisioning and the growing demands for new needs.

In 2012, for example, Toronto Public Library workers implemented such a strategy very successfully as their contracts expired around the same time as Locals 79 and 416. Half of cupe Local 4948’s 1,500 library workers are employed part time and three-quarters are women. The City was essentially trying to rollover the parameters of the 79/416 contract that sought to build on the prior elimination of a hundred positions and an additional 10 percent cut from libraries’ operating budgets. Local 4948 positions had been reduced by 17 percent since amalgamation, even though Toronto Public Library usage grew 29 percent. It is worth noting that, like Local 79 part-time workers, 4948 part-time members have difficulty securing full-time work and rarely qualify for benefits, and even though they must pay 40 percent of those benefits, only 22 percent qualify. A major sticking point throughout negotiations was the City’s attempt to remove a clause that made seniority a factor in assigning part-time shifts, as well as a clause that prohibited layoffs in the event of technological displacement or the elimination of positions. Having reached an impasse, on March 19, 2012, Local 4948 struck.

Unlike Locals 79 and 416 in 2009, library workers received widespread public support and media sympathy. The Writers’ Union of Canada organized a “read-in” and rally in front of the downtown Toronto Reference Library where they were joined by concerned residents, members of the community, parents and children. Prominent author and Torontonian Margaret Atwood spoke out in defence of striking library workers encouraging her more than 300,000 Twitter followers to join the picket lines, participate in rallies, contact local councillors and stand up for quality public services. The dispute highlighted deteriorating investments in public libraries as rally supporters spoke of why the services provided by city workers mattered to them. It also demonstrated that with the broad-based support of community members they could pressure the City to maintain adequate services. After eleven days, library workers and the City reached a new agreement. Under the terms of the four-year deal, full-time and part-time workers are protected from layoffs after eleven years (unlike Locals 79 and 416’s fifteen years) of seniority. Local 4948 members also received a lump sum payment of 1.5 percent in 2012, 0.225 in 2013, 1.75 in 2014 and 2.25 in 2015, as well as the creation of some new full-time positions. The successful struggles of Toronto library workers to protect both public services and the working conditions of their members speaks to the potential of broad-based labour–community mobilizations, creative strategies for garnering positive media attention and the importance of workers acting collectively to improve their lives. Local 79’s “Taking Care of Toronto” radio, internet, billboard and television ads are a good start, as is Local 416’s campaign for public services and the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113’s (ttc workers) “Protecting What Matters” ads. But the limitations of (social) media campaigns need to be made clear. As the experiences of striking library workers showed, there are no substitutes for face-to-face interactions and civic engagement, and this needs to happen within the workplace and extend into the city’s neighbourhoods.

Of course, while there are lessons here that can be generalized to other city workers, part of the library workers’ success no doubt stems from the particular nature of their work as community-embedded service providers. For both Local 79 and 416, past experiences have shown garbage collection to be a lightning rod for public and media disdain. Although representative of a minority of workers on strike, it was without question the most visible and conflict-ridden source of frustration. Preventing Torontonians from disposing of their waste is also the most politically volatile and perhaps ineffective use of tactics. In addition to exposing what happened in other similar cases of contracting-out garbage collection — underbidding and then falling services and escalating costs (tea 2011) — Locals 79 and 416 need to tie the issue of waste management to clean and safe parks, public health and safe drinking water. Preventing communities that might otherwise be on the side of workers by prohibiting them from getting rid of their waste is not only a poor strategic move, it also reinforces the conservative portrayal of unionized workers as indifferent to the needs of the communities they serve. Furthermore, preventing people from disposing of their waste will do little to disrupt the functioning of the city’s day-to-day activities. As was obvious in 2009, despite thirty-nine days on strike, the City could have gone on for months filling waste yards, as they in fact were prepared to do for as long as six months in 2012.

Alongside the public’s obvious frustration, a majority of workers do not work in waste disposal, which meant that recreational staff, ems workers, long-term care providers, water, parks and road maintenance workers, animal services, childcare workers, public health nurses, water treatment and social workers with no experience with waste disposal, were all tasked with shutting down these facilities and devoting their energies in arguably futile ways. Like library workers did, Locals 79 and 416 will need to come up with creative strategies for demonstrating the value and importance of the services they provide to the city. In other words, with the input of community members, they will need to think about ways of utilizing workers before a strike so that a broader connection can be made between public services and privatization, and between civic workers and community life. In this sense, it is necessary to broaden the public’s perception beyond simply sanitation work and towards the vast spectrum of services that city workers provide.

Consider childcare, for example. As mayor, Rob Ford had been very clear in suggesting that Toronto’s 24,000 childcare spaces should be privatized. In 2014, Council moved to eliminate two thousand subsidized spaces that were previously cost-shared with the Province. Quality, affordable childcare remains one of the most sorely needed services in the city with nearly twenty thousand children in Toronto still wait-listed. What’s more, in 2011 the Chair of the Community Development and Recreation Committee, Giorgio Mammoliti, argued that the City should get out of the business of directly providing childcare and recreation services, preferring to contract-out or eliminate existing programs. With over 650 City-subsidized childcare centres in the city, Local 79 could have turned this into a debate about childcare and privatization, and engaged directly in a campaign with parents and caregivers to draw attention to the crisis in affordable child and afterschool recreation care.

Further, civic workers could canvas door-to-door taking stock of community concerns, and in turn informing community members of what they are doing to address them. While there will certainly be resistance from some residents and likely businesses, this could form part of an ongoing strategy for the union to develop the collective educational and political capacities of its members, in addition to deeper ties with social justice groups. Rather than blocking the disposal of waste during a labour dispute, Locals 79 and 416 could develop a public relations strategy that enables and extends the collection of waste through flying squads, say, for the elderly or persons with disabilities. Slowing down residents as they tried to get rid of their waste not only turned some allies into enemies, but assembly-line-like slowdowns allowed the City to manage the chaos in a coordinated fashion. Enabling the disposal of waste could aid in not simply building connections within the communities that are most effected by poor services but also in developing the competencies of union members as they challenge mischaracterizations of civic workers, inform the public of the issues involved in funding the city and politicize issues related to public services, unions, taxation, city revenue, expenditures and so forth.

In the context of some three decades of public services retrenchment, there is a wellspring of discontent among the public pertaining to a lack of affordable, accessible and high-quality public services. Yet, the perception is that these deficiencies in public services arise from civic workers’ indifference to budgetary challenges or community-identified needs, rather than some three decades of revenue erosion and workers’ ever-present challenges to do more with less. They will therefore also need to address issues of inadequacy and current shortcomings, including issues of bureaucracy, in the context of ever-declining funds to support these services and how they are delivered. In this sense, Locals 79 and 416 will need to adapt to the new climate of austerity bargaining by being more radical, not more concessionary. This is not only an organizational issue of how to respond, but also a question of trade union praxis and political culture. It is clear that top-down collective bargaining has been a recipe for disaster and, as the experiences of striking library workers in Toronto suggests, only an active and engaged membership with broad-based community support will be able to lead from below. There are, of course, no simple and immediate solutions to democratizing and rebuilding workers’ political capacities. Workers are not inherently radical or conservative but adapt to the structured conditions they encounter daily. Thus, politicization is always a process where, as Lenin is alleged to have observed, “sometimes decades pass and nothing happens, while other times weeks pass and decades happen.”

If Locals 79 and 416 are to mount an effective resistance against the drive to austerity, they will need to propose an effective political alternative to neoliberal urbanism. This will require democratizing and extending the union beyond its existing membership base by developing concrete strategies for engaging community mobilization on a year-round basis and not only during rounds of collective bargaining. Locals 79 and 416 should also be devoting additional funding to training their members to become community organizers who take greater heed of community-driven needs. Since they share related concerns and are equally influenced by municipal spending decisions, their long-term viability is dependent on crafting the collective capacities to develop deep linkages in the communities they serve and the need to come up with shared strategies and tactics. The turn in the social democratic Miller regime toward neoliberalism already demonstrated that the old clientalistic relations between union leaders and “progressive” city councillors are long gone. Even individually supportive councillors could do little to prevent the decline of city services, selling off of assets or attacks against workers. Rather, a much more engaged and working-class-infused strategy for Locals 79 and 416 is necessary if the focus is going to be on building active solidarity from the ground up. This means creating a bolder public image that mobilizes members and community activists and makes the connections between the services they provide and the communities they serve more visible.

Chapter Six

Towards an Alternative Urban Agenda

Breaking the cycle of permanent austerity and retrenchment that has characterized the last three decades of urban neoliberalism in Ontario requires challenging the continued reliance on tax cuts as a cure for nearly all of society’s social ills, as well as an alternative vision of municipal governance that rejects the market-based remaking of urban life. In addition to expanded revenue transfers from federal and provincial governments, a variety of independent revenue tools are needed if municipalities are going to become fiscally autonomous governance units. In an attempt to address the municipal malaise, mainstream approaches have tended to focus on increasing the scope of market imperatives through a continued ideological and political assault against public services and public sector workers (cfib 2013; University of Toronto Mowat Centre–kpmg 2009). At the same time, business and development groups continue to influence municipal councils through lobbying, local business associations and bankrolling local campaigns for office. These much-recycled approaches, however, rather than addressing municipalities’ structural constraints, reinforce their worst effects. Substantively addressing the revenue crisis that currently besieges municipalities, then, requires an alternative approach rooted in social equity, inclusiveness and justice.

Overcoming the Myth of Fiscal Crisis

The discourse of fiscal crisis is part fact and part fiction. But it is important to separate its economic realities from political pretexts. Because Ontario municipalities are effectively barred by provincial legislation from running annual deficits, many municipalities are on firmer fiscal ground than their provincial and federal counterparts, as is evidenced by balanced operating budgets, manageable levels of borrowing, low debt overhangs and strong credit ratings. While there is much variability across Ontario municipalities, Slack, Tassonyi and Grad (2014) argue that Ontario’s thirty largest municipalities have been fiscally prudent and conservative over the period from 2000 to 2011, thus are efficiently managed and generally well run. They also note a growing disparity between older industrial city–regions (Niagara Falls, Hamilton, Windsor) and northern municipalities (Sudbury, Thunder Bay, Sault Ste. Marie) on the one hand, and gta municipalities (Vaughan, Mississauga, Oakville) on the other, in their ability to raise revenues, their varied dependencies on provincial–federal transfers, pressures on infrastructure and demands for social services. While the former are often dealing with an older and declining population, weak economic growth and, in some cases, harsher climates and geographic remoteness, the latter are growing in population, more economically robust and experiencing a construction boom, thus broadening the property tax base. Hence, there is an unevenness in the Ontario urban and regional political economy.

Two of the foremost authorities on municipal finances, Enid Slack and Andre Cote (2014), have argued that Toronto does not have a spending problem, but rather a revenue problem. Their research demonstrates that, despite the perception that spending has been rapidly growing, in reality expenditures per household are roughly equivalent to what they were in 2000, when adjusted for inflation and population growth. However, there have been some important changes in the allocation of expenditures: while transportation costs grew as a share of operating spending from 21 to 28 percent, and police and fire services have remained constant at 16 percent, social and family services — including social assistance, childcare and seniors’ programs — declined from 27 to 20 percent as a share of total spending. This is equal to more than a 25 percent real cut in social and family services (Slack and Cote 2014: 3).

Much like the Miller-era Independent Fiscal Review Panel and Ford-era Core Services Review, Slack and her colleagues’ work confirms that there are few, if any, remaining efficiencies to be found without lowering services levels or asset sell offs. Property taxes are a very visible and therefore particularly contentious tax as the impression persists that rates have been rising rapidly. Although property taxes account for some 40 percent of the City’s revenue, with provincial and federal transfers worth some 20 percent, when adjusted for inflation and population growth, Toronto’s property tax revenues per household have actually fallen by nearly 15 percent between 2001 and 2012, and are amongst the lowest in the gta. Commercial, industrial and multi-residential taxes are also on their way down and tax increases for these groups have been limited to one-third of residential tax increases. After more than a decade of comparatively low development charges across the gta, Toronto development charges were finally increased in 2013 in order to account for the rising costs of providing infrastructure for new residential developments (Slack and Cote 2014: 10–14). However, while development charges assist in supporting new infrastructure they do not support long-term operations, maintenance and replacement. Also, the assessed property tax is unlikely to generate enough to cover the costs. As a consequence, the burden of paying for ageing infrastructure is shifted from both the private to public sector and from business to workers.

In light of Toronto’s construction boom, which some are warning appears to be vastly overvalued (McMahon 2014), the Land Transfer Tax rose from $150 million in 2009 to $350 million in 2013. The combined value of the City’s assets total nearly $70 billion, excluding land and parkland values. This includes everything from water and wastewater systems, transportation infrastructure, public transit, city buildings, facilities, fleet and public housing. However, pressures to sell off these assets are mounting as a result of the financial inability to maintain and renew existing assets, and build new ones to accommodate population and service level needs (Grewel 2011; Sancton 1996). Estimates suggest that Toronto’s infrastructure deficit will climb from $2 billion in 2013 to $2.4 billion by 2020, as much of the infrastructure built during the 1950s and 1960s goes unrepaired. Likewise, a repair backlog for social housing estimated at $860 million is expected to rise, with $2.6 billion in capital funding needed over the next decade. This structural shortfall is not the result of overgenerous social services or the excessive wages of unionized employees. Rather, they are a legacy of growing, long-term pressures resulting from population growth and downloaded infrastructure and public service costs from provincial and federal governments, especially for transit and housing. Thus Toronto is a city that has both a housing boom and housing crisis existing in tandem.

How to provide quality, affordable housing is, of course, a complex multilateral issue. In general, however, the City of Toronto (as elsewhere) has preferred voluntaristic agreements and incentives for developers, rather than mandatory measures. As noted earlier, given municipalities’ limited financial capacities they are constrained in their abilities to build and operate housing facilities as well as programs that address the lack of affordable housing and homelessness. This does not, however, mean that municipalities are impotent. They can examine their own regulations to eliminate barriers to the provision of affordable housing, including the legalization of secondary units, new density agreements for affordable and rental housing, the provision of land for emergency/transition/supportive/below-market housing, prohibiting the conversion of rental suites and charging a dedicated development levy that goes into a fund for affordable housing. Municipalities can also enhance planning and zoning support, regulation and business licensing; design levies to discourage quick “flipping” and housing market speculation; fine owners of long-term empty “investment” properties; and strengthen by-laws and building regulations. New measures by other levels of government, including new regional coordination and municipal governance capacities, are of course also necessary, such as changes to tax policy to encourage the construction of rental housing, strengthening of existing legislation, maintaining and expanding existing funding programs for homelessness and affordable housing, and inducements for non-profit and cooperative housing. One such measure is an inclusionary zoning policy mandating 10 to 15 percent of all units in large residential buildings be set aside for affordable housing. In fact, since amalgamation, the City has requested more than a dozen times the administrative power to use inclusionary zoning. And yet, despite some 95,000 households on the city’s affordable housing waiting list, the Province has refused to devolve such powers. Although inclusionary zoning will not resolve Toronto’s housing crisis, it will offset some pressures. New investments from federal and provincial governments will also be necessary in order to begin addressing the shortage of affordable housing. However, since transfers are out of municipalities’ hands, there is little certainty about future funding and uploading of costs.

Reimagining the Municipal Bargain

In order to counter the municipal race to the bottom, it is necessary to change the social attitudes about the role of taxation and make the connections between social justice and workplace democracy. Ontario municipalities’ current reliance on property taxes is unsustainable in the long run and merely shifts the burden of responsibility for social and physical infrastructure from one generation to the next, and from capital to labour. While increasing municipal development charges is an important revenue initiative, it tends to be cyclical in nature and relies on the unstable fluctuations of real estate markets. It is necessary, therefore, to establish dedicated funding to municipalities by other tiers of government as well as independent revenue-raising capacities. The fiscal mechanism for this is straightforward in a sense of reversing corporate and personal income tax cuts implemented since at least 2008 and raising the gst back to 7 percent, with dedicated funding to municipalities. These measures could provide consistent and secure funding, which could begin to redress decades of underinvestment and neglect across Canadian municipalities. Turning to wealthy individuals and corporations, who have benefitted the most from neoliberal tax reforms, and having them contribute a fairer share in terms of higher corporate and income taxes, would be a symbolic and significant initial step. But wider populist, anti-tax sentiments must also be challenged, so that more goods and services come through public, and not private, consumption.

As Figure 2 shows, despite the City of Toronto having a broader range of revenue tools than other Ontario municipalities, it continues to overwhelmingly rely on property taxes to raise revenue outside of federal and provincial transfers. And from this, as Figure 3 demonstrates, the City must provide a range of services including general government administration, social assistance, health services, social housing, fire and police services, long-term care, shelters, libraries, parks, recreation and so forth. Hence, an alternative municipal agenda also needs to consider a broader range of options for mobilizing revenues beyond property taxes. This is especially the case so that user fees can be cut and eliminated for many services as part of broader social equity initiatives.

This heavy reliance on property taxes as the major source of revenue is not the norm outside Canada. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (oecd) average is 36 percent. Cities in the Nordic countries — Germany and Switzerland, for example — receive over 90 percent of their tax revenue from income taxes, while Hungary and the Netherlands collect between 50 and 75 percent of local revenue from various sales taxes. Similarly, in France, Japan, Korea and the U.S., sales taxes comprise about 20 percent of local revenue. As the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (2012) has argued, there is no natural law dictating that local governments be exclusively dependent on the property tax. Rather, they argue that a multiplicity of revenue streams is needed to ensure diversity, balance and stable, long-term funding for Canadian municipalities.

There are a number of issues that should be taken into view when considering new revenue-raising capacities for local governments:

The size and corporate sophistication of municipalities, local fiscal conditions, tax administration capacity, and efficiency considerations such as the risk of leakage across jurisdictional boundaries. In general, taxing powers make more sense for larger cities that deliver a broader range of human services, have greater administrative capacity, and could encourage implementation of taxes across metropolitan areas. Local governments should also be responsible for levying the taxes and setting the rates — even when other governments are responsible for administration. (Cote and Fenn 2014: 50)

Extensive research has demonstrated the social and economic benefits of expanding the tax base and reinvesting in public services. The case for enhanced public investment has been made across the political spectrum, in both the private and public sectors as well as by various think-tanks and research centres. The Toronto and York Region Board of Trade, Ontario Chamber of Commerce, Institute for Municipal Finance and Governance, Metrolinx and even the CD Howe Institute have recently moved in this direction (Hjartarson, Hinton and Szala 2011; Scarth 2014; trbot 2013). Metrolinx (2013), a crown agency that administers and integrates road and public transportation across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Areas, has recently suggested a series of investment options for dealing with Toronto’s revenue problem that, unlike inelastic property taxes, are better linked to growth in the local economy. This includes a 1 percent hike to the province’s Harmonized Sales Tax (hst), which would bring in an additional $1.3 billion annually; 25 cents to $1 per day on commercial parking spaces depending on assessed property values, which could generate between $350 million and $1.4 billion; and a 5 cent per litre fuel surcharge estimated to bring in some $330 million. Combined, these new revenue tools could raise around $2 billion annually for transit expansion costing the average household about $477 annually.

When compared with the average cost of congestion, which is estimated to run the average family around $1,600 annually in lost productivity, plus the cost of car ownership pegged at $8,000 per year, these measures are cost effective and ensure that people have access to the services they rely on. It also encourages public, not private, consumption through a reduction in individual car use and fossil fuels emissions. Metrolinx has also suggested the implementation of a tax credit to assist low-income residents in paying the additional hst and related costs. Further funding proposals include: 15 percent increase in development charges worth $100 million; 30 cents per kilometre for high-occupancy toll lanes (free for motorists with at least two passengers, with the option of paying a toll for single drivers), which could bring in anywhere from $25 million to $250 million depending on its expansiveness; $2 to $4 per day for parking at GO stations, which would bring in between $20 and $40 million; land-value capture along transit lines for $20 million; and a 0.5 percent employer payroll levy, which is estimated to raise as much as $920 million (aecom-kpmg 2013; fcm 2003; tcsa 2010; Broadbent 2008).

The Residential and Civil Construction Alliance of Ontario (2010: 6–7) has argued:

Over the next 50 years there is the risk of public infrastructure underinvestment that could cost the Canadian economy 1.1 per cent of real gross domestic product (gdp) growth. The effect of this underinvestment on the Canadian public breaks down as follows: It will cost the average Canadian worker between $9,000 and $51,000, with the younger generation disproportionately at risk, and decrease the after-tax profitability of Canadian businesses by a long term average of 20 per cent … Results show that for every extra dollar paid in taxation revenue, the taxpayer is better off by $1.48 on average, in after-tax wage terms. That means mitigating the underinvestment risk is cost effective.

A number of polls and studies have pointed towards people being willing to pay more in taxes so long as the funding is dedicated to issues that keep people healthy and help balance work–life conflicts — like transit, infrastructure and public services — rather than deal with the consequences of inaction (Burda and Haines 2012; Global Toronto 2014; Transport Canada 2009; Forum Research 2013). New taxation and administrative powers could be accomplished by provincial legislation that cements new revenue-raising capacities, collection and enforcement by aligning local taxes on the provincial rate collected by the Canada Revenue Agency. Some also argue:

Urbanization and the outsized economic role of city–regions are creating pressures to reform fiscal and governance arrangements to foster the conditions for growth and social progress. The trend line has not been smooth, but it has been steadily heading towards the decentralization of responsibilities to local governments … The case for decentralization is premised on the proposition that local governments have superior access to local information compared with higher-order governments, allowing them to better respond to local needs. (Cote and Fenn 2014: 20)

The notion of a “new localism” is one which has been at the heart of a growing debate in central and local government since at the least the early 1990s. The origins of new localist thought stem from pressures on governments to consider whether they should divest more governance capacities at the local level in the context of eroding nation–state power. In an era allegedly characterized by the geographical restructuring of economic relations and spatial reconstitution of state power to supra-national and local bodies, these debates have also tended to juxtapose the coordinated market economies of the post-war Keynesian era with the neoliberal city of the last three decades. But they have also been criticized for reinforcing certain neoliberal frameworks and assumptions (Peck and Tickell 1994; Gough 1996). This includes an emphasis on the virtues of local, globally competitive markets for mobile investment, fiscal restraint, marketization of public services and assets and inter-local competition designed to stimulate business-friendly labour market policies via the erosion of regulatory capacities and new concessionary demands. However, neoliberalism as a political economic practice should not be read as a juxtaposition of (less) state against (more) market, but rather as a particular kind of state suited to the logic of accumulation in a specific historical phase of capitalist development (Albo and Fanelli 2014; Panitch and Gindin 2012).

In the absence of new multi-scalar governance capacities and planning orientations, a disembedded focus on the local may reinforce existing issues and concerns. As discussed above, land-use planning as much as transportation, social ecologies and economic development overlaps with the borders of other municipalities and provinces. Likewise, beggar-thy-neighbour tax policies and intensified municipal competition might undermine land-use planning that seeks to restrain unchecked growth. As Greg Albo notes (2007: 23):

Eco-localism projects the local as an ideal scale and conceives communitarian eco-utopias in a politics that is individualizing and particularizing. Under neoliberalism, eco-localism has evolved into a practical attempt to alter individual market behaviours, and to disconnect and internalize local ecologies and communities from wider struggles and political ambitions.

There are few reasons to suggest, however, that

the national and global are on a scale that is any less human and practical than the local. This is not to deny the importance of the local in anti-neoliberal politics; nor the importance of the question of appropriate scale for post-capitalist societies. It is to insist, however, that local socio-ecological struggles cannot be delinked from — and are indeed always potentially representative of — universal projects of transcending capitalism on a world scale. (Albo 2007: 23)

Building up local bases of power and administration must be connected to projects to transform national state power and to internationalize political struggles and alliances against the world capitalist market. A fetishization of the local can undermine broader equity and social justice initiatives, fragmenting collective planning and alternative policies to neoliberalism (Sharzer 2012).

For Peck and Tickell (2012: 247–8), the solution is not to re-double local efforts aimed at stimulating globally competitive urban environments,

but to challenge and ultimately transcend the extra-local rules of the game that were being shaped by the rolling process of neoliberalization, since the potential of local initiatives would always be limited by an essentially antithetical, competitive inter-local settlement. These challenges, in turn, were framed by the intrinsically regressive scalar politics of neoliberalism, which duplicitously conferred on local agencies and interests responsibility without power, while brazenly granting global institutions and actors power without responsibility.

In the absence of cooperative mechanisms and strategies for new planning orientations between local, regional, national and international levels, then, it is difficult to envision an alternative political economic project emerging.

As geographers are keen to remind, space matters. The extent to which smaller, rural and northern communities can provide expensive services like fire fighting, infrastructure, community services, roads and safe drinking water are much different than the capacities of larger, southern Ontario municipalities. So conferring new powers to municipal councils still requires forming new urban planning orientations at other governance scales. In other words, given the diverse needs and capacities of municipalities, policymaking that recognizes the specificities of size, geography, economy and so on might generate the conditions amenable to creating a province-wide, comprehensive approach to match Ontario’s diverse local needs. This might include, for instance, community boards that debate and advise on local issues, participatory budgeting and region-wide campaigns aimed at living wages. Likewise, strong national and provincial standards for municipalities facilitate best practices and are beneficial because they ensure public health and safety standards as reasonable checks on local autonomy and preventative measures against competitive austerity. Such cooperative intergovernmental arrangements could go a long way in achieving real costs savings, accountability, enhanced outcomes, mature local governance and responsive public services.

In the Canadian mayoral system, where the council remains the supreme decision-maker and the mayor is considered first-among-equals within a legislative body, local governments encounter their own unique set of governance and administrative challenges — as was illustrated by the stripping-away of Rob Ford’s mayoral powers in 2014 (cbc 2013). For instance, beyond new and independent revenue-raising sources, enhanced collection and enforcement of municipal fines and charges could go a long way in recuperating the estimated $1 billion in outstanding charges across Ontario municipalities (Cote and Fenn 2014). But municipalities cannot go it alone in order to resolve issues related to climate change, public transportation, housing, social services and wastewater. These challenges require developing new intergovernmental planning capacities with dedicated funding to launch a national transit strategy and clean water fund, community development strategies in self-governing northern and First Nations communities and new investments in social services provisioning and infrastructure. The only realistic starting point for the Province of Ontario (as much as the Government of Canada) is to recognize that municipal downloading and austerity have created more problems than they have solved. The unwillingness of federal and provincial governments to extend governance autonomy and revenue powers to municipalities prevents local governments from democratically establishing public policies that are a counter to neoliberalism. In practice, this structural incapacity reinforces capital mobility avoiding any centralization or harmonization of policies safeguarding against the potential market-inhibiting “abuses of democracy.”

Of course, there is also a political imperative to do more thinking about alternative responses to the challenges confronting municipalities informed by labour, community groups, First Nations, municipal associations and other civil society groups. “Rights to the city” campaigns in North America, for example, are focusing on free public transit, social housing and public spaces that are protected from commercialization and anti-poverty initiatives. David Harvey (2008: 40) suggests adopting

the right to the city as both working slogan and political ideal, precisely because it focuses on the question of who commands the necessary connection between urbanization and surplus production and use. The democratization of that right, and the construction of a broad social movement to enforce its will is imperative if the dispossessed are to take back the control which they have for so long been denied, and if they are to institute new modes of urbanization.

Of course, only new organizational capacities will make such ideas politically viable. As such, the goal over the long term should include dedicated organizing strategies intent on creating new inroads into spaces currently seen as private. These initiatives would need to emphasize the social value of extending public services and shift the debate from focusing solely on individual consumerist needs met through the market and tax cuts, to creating livable cities that offer decent employment, public spaces, universal public services and climate change-informed development.

Making the case for an expanded public sector counters the prevailing orthodoxy of neoliberalism — one that challenges private accumulation as the engine of economic growth — and raises a set of demands for non-commodified labour and services. This means not only expanding the redistributive role of the state, but also taking the lead in ensuring access to housing, public transit, community centres and other social services irrespective of urban and regional boundaries. Reducing public spending will increase unemployment, weaken consumption and exacerbate income inequality, along with reinforcing ethno-racial and gendered labour market/life insecurities. One of the silver linings of the recession has been the fact that governments can borrow money at historically low interest rates, making large-scale public reinvestments feasible. Likewise, with the cash holdings of non-financial corporations increasing faster in Canada than anywhere else in the G7 since the mid-2000s, it is clear that corporate hordes of “dead money” — to borrow a phrase from former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney — have also become an economic and social liability, particularly in the context of the private sector’s unwillingness to create new jobs.

Research by Jim Stanford has shown that “since the first of several rounds of business tax reforms and reductions were implemented in 1988, business investment has declined by 1 full percentage point of gdp — even though after-tax business cash-flow has increased (in part as a direct result of the tax reforms) by 3 to 4 percentage points of gdp.” This led Stanford (2011: 3-4) to conclude: “As a means of stimulating growth, employment and even private business spending the historical evidence suggests that business tax cuts are both economically ineffective and distributionally regressive.” Instead of using the extra cash to boost investments in machinery, equipment, new plants, new hires and research and development, nearly half of all profits have gone to boosting shareholder dividends. As such, the rate of investment in new machinery, equipment and people over the past decade has declined in lockstep with lower tax rates, putting Canada dead last among peer countries when it comes to new investments in research and development (clc 2012; Conference Board of Canada 2014). By the end of 2014 corporations held some $680 billion on hand, larger than Canada’s national debt, during which time new public investments as a percentage of gdp fell from the average of 2–3 percent in the 1960s and 1970s to around 0.5 percent since the mid-1990s, where it has remained ever since. Reallocating this “dead money” away from financing tax cuts and toward new public investments in social and physical infrastructure through a reversal of the tax cuts that have been a hallmark of neoliberal governments would provide both a direct economic stimulus and job growth in the face of the private sector’s unwillingness to spend. Thus the focus ought to be on enhancing public revenue by rebuilding stable, long-term funding streams rather than that one-size-fits-all diktat of austerity-driven expenditure restraint and service cuts alone.

In the absence of organized civic political parties (they are effectively banned in Ontario by the Municipal Elections Act), trade union and community activists must fill that void. One of the few exceptions in speaking out against municipal service level and staff cuts has been radical sections of the anti-poverty movement. In the face of continued gentrification across Toronto (partly driven by the property tax that is tied to market value), falling housing affordability and a looming real estate bubble, many working poor families continue to fall deeper into debt amidst increasing social insecurity in what is ultimately a city divided by race and class (Hulchanski 2010; Walks and Maaranen 2008). It is not clear that the moral outrages at the service cuts that have been the dominant political response of various civil society organizations and some unions will lead organizationally to anything new and more effective. A long period of stagnation could heighten the municipal crisis as poorly funded cities continue their social polarization and decline. The political coalitions that have arisen in Toronto (and across Ontario) to fight the cuts over the last two decades have been unable to reverse these processes, although they have certainly slowed it down in some important ways.

Some of the most notable of these are found in locally rooted union and community-based movements. This includes Local 79 and 416 campaigns for the extension of public services; Toronto Hydro workers’ struggles against privatization; Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113’s We Move Toronto campaign for the expansion of public transit; and the Toronto and York Region Labour Council’s Retirement Security for Everyone campaign. Others include the Good Jobs For All Coalition, an alliance of community, labour, social justice, youth and environmental organizations challenging low-waged and precarious work across the city and region; the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and the Stop the Cuts campaign; the Idle No More and Defenders of the Land housing and Indigenous rights movements; Toronto Environmental Alliance efforts around waste privatization, opposition to the Line 9 oil pipeline between Ontario and Quebec and climate justice; Ontario Health Coalition efforts against cuts to healthcare funding and public–private partnerships; the Workers’ Action Centre-led campaign for a $15 Living Wage; and No One Is Illegal struggles around migrant justice, just to name a few. While it is still too early to tell what will amount of these movements and campaigns over the long term, these labour and community-based responses to social injustice are beginning to rebuild a democratic praxis from below that challenges market rule. Activists continue to struggle with new ways of understanding the relationship of movements to one another, their shared interests and how to build solidaristic political capacities wherein alternative and oppositional political views may emerge.

Rebuilding the Left: Inside and Outside of Organized Labour

cupe has over 250 municipal locals representing nearly 30 percent of its total union membership. 80,000 of cupe’s municipal members are in Ontario alone. Across the province, some three-quarters of municipal workers are unionized, representing roughly one in five workers, although bargaining is highly fragmented across 166 collective agreements as of 2012. The Drummond Commission proposed allowing municipalities to voluntarily opt into centralized bargaining; however, it is unclear to what extent municipal governments and local labour unions would be willing to collaborate across jurisdictions. It is important to recall that in the context of municipal governments increasingly removing the right to strike (as the City of Toronto did via the Province in 2011 with its ttc workers) by making its workers “essential,” a province-wide municipal labour and community strategy may open new areas of collaboration to match the turn to state coercion. While negotiated wage settlements with fire and police services in Toronto have grown at an average annual rate of 3.3 percent over the period from 2003 to 2013, agreements with other unionized municipal workers grew by 2.7 percent, slightly above private sector wage growth at 2.2 percent. Unlike Toronto civic workers in Locals 79, 416 and 4948, in 2011 the Toronto police services union was awarded an 11.5 percent wage increase (about $100 million) over four years. In 2013, an arbitrator also awarded firefighters a pay increase of more than 14 percent over five years, well above wage settlements negotiated with other Toronto municipal workers. Although the size of the city’s workforce has remained relatively constant since 2000, compensation costs rose from 42 to 49 percent as a share of overall expenses, although this growth has been uneven across the City’s workforce. This unevenness has reinforced the gendered and racialized labour of Locals 79, 416 and 4948, reinforcing male patriarchy and the social construction of protective services. Unlike the case of police and firefighters, Toronto Council has been forceful with respect to layoffs and wage retrenchment with its other civic workers precisely because they are seen as service providers of secondary significance. Toronto City Council’s elimination of post-retirement benefits for Locals 79 and 416 workers was not an economic imperative but a political one. While the City made the case that an aging workforce and growing post-retirement premiums were unsustainable, this could not be further from the truth. The Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (omers), a mandatory plan shared equally between municipal employers and employees, has been a major success with its defined benefit pension plan vastly outperforming its defined contribution and “hybrid” private sector pension plan counterparts (Dean 2013; omers 2014).

The course of neoliberalism has thoroughly beaten back what vestiges remain of trade union militancy, notwithstanding important exceptions, of course, while social movements generally remain isolated in small-scale and resource-poor coalitions. Given the ongoing onslaught against public services, and private and public sector unions more generally, trade union and community activists must seek to transcend existing limitations in strategy, tactics and organizational relationships. This is the only realistic starting point from which to move forward. New coalitions, alignments and networks will most certainly emerge as the municipal austerity agenda hardens. The challenge facing trade union and social justice activists at the local level and beyond is to integrate short-, medium- and long-term goals in mutually reinforcing ways that enhance demands for the right to the city. Rather than allowing the continued neoliberal restructuring of municipalities, local public spaces have the potential to become radical nodes of social justice and democracy activism, creating new experiments in organizing social life.

For instance, since community centres are located at the heart of various neighbourhoods, they serve as pivotal spaces for the exchange of information and discussion. Why not reclaim or occupy community centres as central spaces of the community via city provider and community user alliances? The political potential of an “occupy” movement that seeks to reclaim community centres with local groups and activists, particularly in light of hundreds of millions in service cuts and tens of millions in new user fees, is rife for a range of political openings. In this regard, Local 79 and other civic workers will need to consider a more interventionist approach across the communities its members serve. Since Animal Services, for example, is an important part of the city, workers could hold “animal information events” and give community members an opportunity to bring their pets out so that they could ask questions, creating new relationships between workers and community members, and publicizing the other services (besides waste collection) civic workers supply.

Likewise, perhaps the union could start an outreach and advocacy program that introduces its diverse workers’ skills to the communities in which they are embedded; for example, community discussions with employment and social services professionals, architects, planners and transportation specialists, early childhood educators and elder care professionals, parks, forestry, culture and recreation workers and so on. This could form part of a broader public relations and engagement strategy as was utilized strongly by library workers. In a promising move, cupe Local 79, in conjunction with janitorial workers and the city’s broader labour movement, launched the Justice and Dignity for Cleaners campaign to preserve their living wages employment. Between 2011 and 2013, Mayor Ford and Council sought to contract-out a thousand custodial positions. The Justice and Dignity for Cleaners campaign was successful in building coalitional support behind a morally compelling campaign that forestalled City efforts to privatize an important, if underappreciated segment of the city’s workforce. While a small success, for Carson and Siemiatycki (2014) this campaign suggests that resistance to precarity is not futile, even though this might not necessarily constitute a major victory for labour in the grand scheme of things. But it is a hopeful and promising start, addressing some of the shortcomings of past failures.

Nevertheless, it is likely that trade unionism as usual will only lead to public sector workers becoming even more cut off and feeling vulnerable. Public services address real needs and result from previous rounds of class struggle, but they also address the need of the capitalist state to reproduce class society. There are aspects to almost all public sector work that are class disciplining, that working-class residents experience as disciplining and that make it easier to scapegoat them in periods of austerity and right-wing populism. Public sector workers provide needed collective consumption but they are also understood as representing the long arm of the state (Albo et al. 1993; Gindin 2012, 2013). Neoliberal policy has shifted the balance towards the disciplining function. Developing the strength to defend working conditions and jobs can only come from getting a key part of the public on side. This is why public sector unions cannot simply defend public services, they must also call for them to be transformed.

As Michael Hurley and Sam Gindin (2011) note, this requires

reallocating union resources, building new local and sectoral as well as national capacities, a profound deepening of membership participation, rethinking how unions relate to the community, daring to publically expose poor services while speaking to show they could be improved, and developing the confidence and vision to move beyond fighting on “their” terrain — a terrain on which competitiveness and keeping bankers solvent and happy dominates all other values. It essentially involves, to put it bluntly, a revolution inside our unions.

These struggles can only have a chance of widespread success if taken on with a class sensibility, alongside with the rest of labour and community groups that push for a different kind of state and alternative visions of urban life. As Stefan Kipfer (1998: 177) has argued in reference to struggles throughout the 1990s: “The Toronto case thus calls for a notion of urban politics broad enough to escape the confines of the local and open enough to search for transformational potential in defensive struggles.” The politics of austerity that has emerged since 2008 takes further steps toward the privatization of the public sector, deploying anti-democratic measures in defence of austerity and market freedoms. Capitalist class and state militancy against workers, particularly those unionized, has been a hallmark of “post-recession” collective bargaining. As both the tenures of Rae in Ontario and Miller in Toronto suggest, it is ever more difficult to envision the “democratic capitalism” that has animated much of social democracy as a feasible alternative to neoliberalism. This raises questions about the conditions under which a political opposition that deepens and extends democratic capacities against neoliberal capitalism may flourish.

In addition to transforming the everyday practices of unions and their relationship to the broader public and community allies, raising these concerns might lead to communities demanding more decision-making powers at the local level. These concerns could be communicated by pressuring local councillors, sit-ins, workplace and public space takeovers, park protests, educational sessions and the creation of community caucuses made up of labour, social justice and other activists. This will also need to include new engagement with the community, including leafleting and informational campaigns outside daycare and recreation centres, child and elder care facilities and public health and social assistance centres. Since these initiatives would be locally rooted, the potential exists for city- and region-wide alliances that develop a collective set of demands to begin thinking about and strategizing around. While job actions should be about most effectively demonstrating the many skills and competencies of city workers in ways that connect them with the communities they are rooted in, and the value in keeping them public, community initiatives would seek to cement those relationships, identifying existing service level gaps and identifying ways of collectively addressing them.

Such a strategy was very effectively executed by workers in Ottawa and Gatineau. On September 21, 2009, 375 Public Service Alliance of Canada (psac) members with Local 70396 took job action against the Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation (cmcc), which operates both the Canadian Museum of Civilization and Canadian War Museum, for its efforts to freeze wages and contract-out employment. Striking museum workers put together regular cultural events that normally would have taken place inside the museum, and instead held them outside. These events were open to the public and provided the workers with an opportunity to organize and work together on the picket line in a fulfilling way. The successful execution of the events, such as one honouring veterans on Remembrance Day and the “picket line tea party” held in celebration of Prince Charles’ visit to Canada, contributed in a substantial way to workers’ ability to maintain their spirits throughout the strike. The events also demonstrated the skill and creativity of workers to the public, as well as presented them as valuable and socially productive workers. This was especially clear when the Museum of Civilization opened the “Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures” exhibit and the workers created their own exhibit featuring themselves, entitled “Striking Treasures.” As striking workers gained confidence through concerted action and the support of the community mounted, there was a clear turn toward a more class-conscious unionism as the connections between the employed and unemployed, communities and workplaces became all the more clear (Fanelli and Lefebvre 2011).

In addition to uniting with other unions’ campaigns for public services, there may be ways for unions to coordinate actions with community groups that reinforce existing campaigns or take on initiatives that the unions are not in a position to do. Rebuilding trade union capacities and working-class politics in ways that mutually reinforce critical struggles in and around community-identified needs works on a number of intersecting levels. Because neoliberalism not only subjugates and attacks working people but integrates and builds upon workers’ interdependencies, a successful project for union renewal must aim to rebuild not only the capacities of its dues-paying members but those of the working class as a whole (Camfield 2011; Fletcher and Gapasin 2008; Turner and Cornfield 2007; Gindin 2013).

The Old is Dying and the New Struggles to be Born

In the Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci (1971: 276) wrote: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Local governance is stuck in an interregnum caught between the dead end of neoliberal urbanism on the one hand, and struggles to envision a local political economy rooted in workplace democracy and social justice on the other. Morbid symptoms include social polarization, attacks against labour rights and freedoms, declining access to public services and an aggressive capitalist class and state offensive. It might be said that the root causes of oppression and inequality are well documented, but not their alternatives. How, then, to respond? How might cities and communities go from laboratories of neoliberal policy experimentation to vibrant democracies anchored in an alternative vision of community life?

It is clear that processes of neoliberal urbanism will continue apace in the absence of left alternatives mobilized at the local level. Thinking strategically means going beyond mere defensive battles. The fiscal/revenue crisis is real, but both ends of it — the increased need for public services and the declining revenue base — are caused by capital, not the working class nor the reasonable demands of its unions for health and safety standards, emotional fulfillment and income and retirement benefits that provide a decent quality of life. In the current funding model, the public provision of municipal services is made possible only by capitalist growth (new development means new property taxes), provincial and federal grants and new fees and service charges. During an economic downturn, the first is unlikely (while the existing tax base remains flat until home prices pick up and assessments catch up with them). Grants, meanwhile, dry up in the absence of sustained stimulus. Thus the only options remaining during fiscal crises appear to be to levy new taxes or raise existing tax rates, cut public provisioning, sell off services and assets, raise user fees or cut costs by squeezing labour or developing so-called public–private partnerships. The issue then is about which services get cut or privatized, and whose taxes and fees get raised, and at what proportion.

Public sector unions are on the front lines of this struggle. Currently in a defensive position as they come under attack at all levels (federal, provincial and municipal), they of course must defend their members against rollbacks of hard-won benefits. Yet the vitriol directed at them is intense, often as if they live lavish lives at the expense of non-unionized workers. The experiences of municipal workers in Toronto, as elsewhere, suggest that there is much to do to overcome popular hostility toward unionized workers. Changing this attitude is not only the task of the unions themselves, but of the broader Left. The solidarity between non-unionized and unionized workers, and the general public at large, remains in a deep crisis of its own. More, of course, is necessary to support the efforts of public sector workers, and one way to do this is to make the demand for publically provided services part of the common sense. The public provision of goods and services, well managed in a way that fosters sustainable development and social justice initiatives, and which is accountable to the community, significantly improves standards of living across communities. It is necessary to ensure that the public at large understands this as well through community engagement initiatives led by unions, community organizations and other local groups — and fight to make sure property owners and the wealthy pay their fair share to keep the public sector strong across scales of the state. This needs to be highlighted in every social movement of labour and activists.

But part of the problem is structural: Canadian unions today are generally designed to look out for their members, not for the working class as a whole (as much as they do this too), and as long as they remain under attack and permanently on the defensive, in the absence of an organized and structured Left outside of labour there is little else they can do. They cannot transcend the institutional and legal limitations that dictate so much of their behaviour. This requires a Left, as much outside as inside, of official trade union structures. As part of this process of renewed working-class politics, a new Left would need to have connections both inside and outside of the labour movement and seek to link these issues across workplaces, engage in political debates and organize across communities. This requires working to build the capacities of the entire union to fight back against concessionary demands; developing a movement inside the union that pushes for enhanced democratic participation and control; a radically feminist, anti-racist, class-struggle-oriented political praxis that engages with the struggles of the broader community; and educational efforts intent on building a cadre of workers and activists that embody both intellectual understanding and engagement. Efforts to democratize Local 79 and strengthen worker solidarity have resurfaced at many different points over the last decade. The most recent was in response to the failures of 2009. A core of activist members with a commitment to social justice began the Local 79 Reform Caucus. After a few months of organizing, however, the Caucus stagnated and then disappeared, owing to worker burnout due to a disproportionate share of organizing borne by a small group of members. This is a reoccurring challenge facing trade union and community activists and understanding the reasons for how and why such reform movements fail or succeed and the challenges they encounter along the way are crucial to developing the capacities necessary to confront workplace precarity and community oppression in its various forms (Harden 2013; Ross and Savage 2013).

As Kipfer (1998: 177) argues, “caught up in the contradictions between the macro-structures of capital and state and the micro-worlds of everyday life, urban politics … articulates local, regional, national, continental, and world-wide scales all at the same time … And as the contemporary conditions for knowing and changing the world, the urban has universalizing properties and transformational potential.” Two recent experiences illustrate the importance and influence that anti-capitalist perspectives can have on labour–community coalitions and their transformative potential. In 2012, the City of Chicago sought to implement a broad program of education “reform,” including teacher layoffs; the elimination of benefits and reductions in pay; increased use of high-stakes testing and greater importance in teacher evaluations; reductions to education spending; and new decision-making powers concentrated in the hands of supervisors. After failed negotiations and for the first time in twenty-five years, the Chicago Teachers Union (ctu), with the backing of 23,780 out of 26,502 members, struck on September 10, 2012, against a broad attack on public schooling by corporate-backed privatizers.

Years in the making, the ctu had spent countless hours building a grassroots movement to educate and organize the entire union membership to fight back against concessionary demands (Lyderson 2013). Launching a counter-narrative against free market reforms and backing it up with concrete labour–community confrontations, they challenged the right-wing agenda of Mayor Rahm Emmanuel and private sector reformers as they sought to commodify the delivery of public education. Led by the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (core), “whose members were relatively new to activism or involvement in the union, including some who never saw themselves as ‘political,’ to others who were members of socialist groups, unaffiliated radicals of different stripes, as well as those teachers interested in progressive/alternative pedagogies” (Brogan 2014: 149–150), they called for smaller class sizes, more preparation time, a decrease in standardized testing and increases in music, art, gym and other programs available at public schools.

core emphasized deep alliances with parents, students and community organizations, while at the same time building rank-and-file power in the workplace (Uetricht 2014). The ctu was joined at downtown protest rallies by a handful of other unions and community organizations as more than thirty thousand marched through African-American and Latino communities in recognition that they have been the most hard hit historically and in regards to demands for contemporary concessions. While a tentative agreement reached with teachers on September 14 did not hold, members of the ctu voted to end the strike on September 18. The new agreement advanced over six hundred new positions in art, music and gym, raised wages by 7 percent over three years, froze healthcare payments, implemented new language to promote racial diversity in hiring and included new provisions against workplace harassment and intimidation, a new teacher evaluation system and increases to supply reimbursement. While the strike was not a complete victory — fifty schools were subsequently closed and there remain some important divisions among both public and private sector unions — core has continued to build an oppositional movement inside and outside of the union that challenges austerity urbanism and puts forward an alternative vision of urban life in preparation for future rounds of bargaining.

Second, the Quebec student movement throughout 2012 is suggestive. Sometimes referred to as the Maple Spring, tens of thousands of young people took to the streets beginning in February, objecting to the Quebec Liberal government’s planned 75 percent hike in university tuitions fees (Ayotte-Thompson and Freeman 2012; Choudry and Shragge 2013). A series of marches, demonstrations and rallies followed involving more than half of Quebec’s student population. In the months that followed they were joined by tens of thousands of unionized and non-unionized workers across the public and private sectors protesting the government’s draconian austerity measures, with close to a quarter-million people at its peak. Led by the Coalition large de l’Association pour une solidarité syndicale (classe), a temporary coalition of some sixty thousand students throughout the province, the perspective that unified classe and was widely communicated throughout the movement was largely anti-neoliberal, with important segments of anti-capitalists and deep undercurrents of class politics. classe was joined by the associations representing cegep (college) and other university students, such as the Fédération étudiante collégiale du Québec (fecq) and the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (feuq), as well as cupe and Confédération des syndicats nationaux (Collombat 2014).

Movement participants used creative strategies to disrupt the government’s pro-austerity plans, including sit-ins, square occupations and casseroles marches — protesters banging on pots and pans throughout the streets (Solty 2012; Harden 2013). The protesters received widespread public support from celebrities, singers and comedians, such as Paul Piché and Yvon Deschamps, as well as members of the arts community, pundits and former politicians. Supporters wore a small red square pinned to their clothes in solidarity with protesters. The government sought to exclude classe from negotiations with other student representatives, triggering major demonstrations throughout Montreal. A number of protests were met by severe repression, including police use of tear gas and flash-bang grenades, as well as steep fines and unlawful detainment of protestors. On May 18, 2012, the Quebec Liberal government passed Bill 78, which limited freedom of assembly, protest and picketing without prior police approval. It also placed limitations on the rights of education workers and other public sector employees to strike (Bégin-Caouette and Jones 2014). In response, on May 22 movement participants organized one of the most significant acts of civil disobedience in Canadian history when tens of thousands protesters marched through the streets defying the government’s diktat. Police responded by declaring the march illegal, they deployed crowd disbursement measures such as canine patrols, noise bombs and firing rubber bullets, with over one thousand protesters arrested. In the days that followed, over 150,000 people marched in the streets culminating in the Quebec government pulling out of negotiations with student leaders. Protests continued through the summer and on August 1 the Jean Charest Liberal government called a general election, which was framed as a referendum on the government’s austerity plans. On September 4, under the leadership of Pauline Marois, the Parti Québécois was elected to a minority government. Two weeks later they fulfilled their election promises, indefinitely freezing planned rate increases, indexing tuition to the cost of living, repealing Bill 78 and holding a summit on the future of higher education. The student associations voted to put an end to the strike, although they vowed to keep the pressure on the government concerning access to and quality of education, social inclusiveness and an immediate end to continued erosion of public services spending.

Although the 2012 protests must be placed in the context of Quebec’s historically militant student movement and the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, it galvanized a new generation of student activism bringing into the fold public and private sector workers, unionized and non-unionized workers, those un(der)employed and broad-based community movements. While there were significant levels of public support, there remained a very vocal opposition that called for clamping down on student and worker activism. The student movement also experienced some tensions, particularly in anglophone Montreal, where some students sought court injunctions to prevent pickets in front of classrooms. Disagreements also remained among the more radical segments of classe and some of the other student associations that pursued “partnership” arrangements with university administrators and government officials. What will become of the Maple Spring remains an open question, especially in light of the 2014 Quebec general elections, which saw a return of a majority Liberal government headed by Philippe Couillard. Like the experiences of the ctu, the Quebec experience is illustrative of the significance that radicalized labour and social justice activists can have in combating austerity measures and rekindling demands for a different vision of society. The degree to which they are able to build upon and extend these small victories in ways that reinforce struggles against multiple registers of oppression will determine to what extent labour–community coalitions will be able to mount an effective political opposition to austerity.

While there is a need to push the fiscal/revenue crises back onto the capitalist class and off the backs of workers, it is clear that the management and funding of Ontario municipalities is fundamentally flawed. Greater commitments by the federal and provincial governments, including new local administrative powers, are necessary to alleviate both the fiscal and social crisis of local life. Fixing them requires a great deal of collective capacity building in order to bring together workers, social justice activists and community groups. In short, local and regional communities are not the playgrounds of the capitalist class but the places that most people live, work and play. Collective struggles have tended to take the form of demands of the City, while they ought to be based in class consciousness — and urban consciousness — and demand instead the opportunity to restructure the city to serve public needs rather than those of capital.

The City of Toronto has been in a steady state of decline in the quality of its planning, services and infrastructure for several decades now. The foremost strategy of the Ford administration had been to try to make do with even fewer public spaces and to leave as much room as possible for market forces to accommodate the continual pressures of urban growth. Unions alone are incapable of posing alternative social and political strategies that reject corporatism. This requires a radicalized labour movement, left of social democracy, that can serve as a nodal point of community engagement and place a range of alternatives on the public agenda. Despite a series of defeats, however, this is not yet happening within Local 79 (and, in many ways, its sister unions). The Left in Toronto continues to be divided into a panoply of coalitions without any coherence of strategy or program. Changing this will require a radicalized labour and social justice movement approach that transcends activist subcultures, makes political demands and builds organizational capacities that are locally entrenched and scaled upwards and outwards. Without a strong urban and regional approach to union strategy, deeply rooted in the community and forging new relationships with workers providing services and the users of those services, indications suggest Toronto City Council will continue down this hard right agenda. Toronto civic workers face a historic test that may well set a precedent nationally, given the pivotal place of civic workers in public sector unions. Whether or not such a program will encounter a concerted political pushback remains an open question.

Afterword

Much as Toronto does not have a fiscal crisis, Ontario municipalities do not have a spending problem but a revenue problem. In the absence of a concerted pushback, municipal governments can only administer what senior governments create. Ontario municipalities, and Toronto in particular, nevertheless are likely to encounter a number of pressures down the road that will stretch local finances and require political compromises. Never letting a crisis go to waste means using those opportunities as moments to do things that were seemingly unlikely or impossible beforehand (Mirowski 2014). Since the 1970s, it has often been neoliberals who have used moments of crisis for transformational purposes. The steps taken at City Hall since amalgamation, but especially since the onset of the 2008 global economic downturn and election of Rob Ford, take further steps toward the remaking of the local state in neoliberal form. As the role of cities and metropolitan areas increases in domestic and international importance and are seen as cultural and economic centres as well as expressions of political discontent, the need for policy nuance that recognizes the different needs of large and small cities, urban and rural, northern and southern, grows ever more important. Clearly, there is a need to better integrate, coordinate and administer provincial–municipal services delivery, including greater federal participation. Yet the extent of senior-level involvement seems increasingly uncertain as the one-size-fits-all dogma of neoliberalism dominates policymaking. This uncertainty in stable, long-term funding leaves municipalities vulnerable to both changes in financial arrangements and changes in government. For instance, in the summer of 2014 the Ontario Liberal government announced $100 million in annual investments in small towns with fewer than 100,000 persons. In response to these much publicized “new investments,” St. Thomas, Ontario, mayor, Heather Jackson, whose city numbers around 38,000 people, said: “We’re nearing $300 million worth of infrastructure deficit in our community alone … we’re certainly looking forward to being able to access more funds” (Ferguson 2014). The irony of this announcement is that it comes on the heels of reductions to the Ontario Municipal Partnership Fund, which saw transfers payments to northern municipalities down $28 million in 2014, and an expected $35 million in 2015 (amo 2014). These reductions come in the face of forecasted provincial austerity measures extending to 2017–18, which a good many critics, including the Drummond Commission, have noted will require spending cuts deeper than the Harris era. In the face of governments’ continued affinity to neoliberalism and commitment to austerity, the future of municipal financing is unclear. What is certain, however, is that in the absence of greater federal–provincial involvement as well as new municipal revenue-raising capacities and governance autonomy — which, of course, could only be operationalized though successive economic and political struggles — such inaction will heighten the social dislocations across Ontario municipalities.

New Mayor, Same Problems?

On October 27, 2014, municipalities across Ontario went to the polls to elect new mayors and regional and municipal representatives. In Toronto, despite a scandal-plagued term, Rob Ford was the first to announce his plans to seek a second mandate. Throughout the summer, rumours swirled that former trustee, city councillor and member of Parliament Olivia Chow would run for mayor. Upon announcing her run, most polls had Olivia Chow favoured to win by a wide margin. A third contender however, John Tory, would eventually secure the mayoral office. Tory, whose grandfather created one of Bay Street’s largest law firms working with the finance, insurance and real estate industries, was well known for his long-standing Conservative ties. A former backroom operative for the Mike Harris Conservatives, he held several leadership positions in the federal Conservative government of Brian Mulroney. In between his stints in politics and the revolving door to the highest echelons of corporate Canada, Tory opened a private legal practice, served as president and ceo of Rogers Media, commissioner of the Canadian Football League, a radio personality and chair of CivicAction. In between these activities, he also ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Toronto in 2003 and served as leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservative Party from 2004 to 2009, and as a member of Provincial Parliament from 2005 to 2009.

After supporting both Rob and Doug Ford in the 2010 election, however, 2014 would be different. While an in-depth appraisal of the election is not possible here, some central issues are nevertheless worth a mention. While Rob Ford was incommunicado during a two-month stint in rehab, Chow and Tory each sought to coalesce voters around an anyone-but-Ford coalition. Chow’s weak political vision, borrowing from the dismal Andrea Horwath ndp provincial platform, presented a “third way” social democratic vision that touted her work with small business and ability to work with conservative Mel Lastman during her time on City Council. Her “moderate,” “sensible” social democratic campaign focused on pocketbook populism, building the fully funded Scarborough light-rail transit and plans to increase the Land Transfer Tax from its current 2 percent to 3 percent on residential properties selling for more than $2 million.

The Toronto and York Region Labour Council, which endorsed Olivia Chow, launched the Our Cities Matter campaign, which sought to publicize issues related to transit, poverty, precarious work, racial equity and the range of services provided by municipal workers, including child and elder care, libraries and environmental initiatives. cupe Locals 79 and 416, as well as the Elementary Teachers of Toronto and Ontario Public Service Employees Union, also supported the Chow campaign. Collectively, unifor, the United Food and Commercial Workers, cupe National and United Steelworkers banded together under the banner “Progressive Toronto” to run a series of ads accusing John Tory of being “out of touch” with women (after suggesting they learn how to play golf to get a pay raise). Like all too many labour campaigns, however, both the Our Cities Matter and Progressive Toronto campaigns stagnated and then vanished, having failed to build an activist base from which to educate and mobilize. As was demonstrated in both the 2009 and 2012 rounds of bargaining, organized labour’s emphasis on backing individual councillors failed to generate a critical mass of elected officials challenging the austerity agenda. Moreover, in the absence of broad-based public backing, councillor support (even where possible) is unlikely to develop without building long-term, community-centred organizational and mobilizational approaches, not campaigns that come and go with elections.

The centrepiece of John Tory’s plan revolved around “SmartTrack,” an $8 billion, twenty-two-stop “surface subway” using existing GO Transit tracks. Despite significant flaws in the plan (Gee 2014; Barber 2014a), the proposal is premised on an additional $5 billion in provincial and federal funding, including $2.6 billion from tax increment financing — borrowing billions in the hope that the property tax base grows enough to pay it off. His plan also called for building a Scarborough subway and lowering property taxes along the route for ten years in order to encourage business development. Other initiatives included a code of conduct and, tellingly, a City task force that would look into restructuring opportunities for Toronto Community Housing Corporation. As a result of being diagnosed with cancer six weeks before the election, Rob Ford dropped out of the mayoral race, announcing his intention to run for his old seat on City Council. His brother, Doug Ford, took his place as heir to Ford Nation. His campaign essentially repeated the dogma of his brother’s 2010 election — going after the “gravy,” keeping taxes low, spurring business development, taking a tough stance with city unions and building subways, not light-rail transit.

On election day, John Tory was elected mayor with 40 percent of the vote, while Doug Ford and Olivia Chow received 34 and 23 percent of the vote. In an attempt to present himself as non-ideological, throughout his campaign John Tory vowed not to steer the city to the left or right but forward. Olivia Chow failed to capitalize on her initial popularity, running a cautious, middle-of-the-road campaign, while Doug Ford seemed to lack the popular charisma characteristic of his brother Rob, who retained a seat on Council. Tory also seemed to benefit from the anyone-but-Ford vote as the Chow campaign focused much of their energy and resources going after the Ford brothers, as opposed to the gaps in John Tory’s SmartTrack or his stated affinity to the Ford administration’s political program minus the scandals.

Through the 2014 campaign, John Tory denied that both white privilege and the deep currents of racism in Toronto exist. This was in spite of many instances to the contrary, such as the experience of Munira Abukar, a Muslim woman and community activist whose campaign signs were vandalized saying “go back home,” racist and homophobic slurs against Kristen Wong-Tam, who was running for Council re-election, and repeated racial and gendered intimations and explicit remarks directed at Olivia Chow. These overtures culminated in a shockingly inappropriate Toronto Sun cartoon by Andy Donato portraying Chow as a racial caricature and Mao-style communist riding the coattails of her late husband, Jack Layton. Toronto’s Bay Street community lined up behind John Tory, who attracted some $2.5 million from donors, while Olivia Chow raised $1.7 million and Doug Ford around $300,000. The Toronto Taxpayers Coalition (Peat 2014) mounted a Stop Chow Now campaign, arguing that she made former Mayor David Miller look like a fiscal conservative, warning: “The left is pulling out all the stops to recapture the city and restore a tax and spend socialist government.” In his early days, John Tory has touted privatizing public services, pro-business development and tax “incentives,” as well as holding the line on taxes and reaching a “fair” deal with the city’s unionized workers. It may very well turn out to be that with the election of John Tory, Toronto merely exchanged an incompetent conservative with a sophisticated one.

Of the forty-four councillors making up Toronto City Hall, thirty-six out of thirty-seven incumbents won their seats, seven councillors are new and one is last term’s mayor. With this election, the conservative agenda has been largely strengthened: new councillours include Stephen Holyday, son of former councillour and provincial Conservative member of Parliament Doug Holyday; investment firm director Justin Di Ciano; former right-wing Liberal member of Parliament Jim Karygiannis; and former police officer Jon Burnside. As journalist Edward Keenan (2014) has written, when it comes to appointing City Council’s executive and chairs of committees and agencies, John Tory’s appointments “read like a declaration of war against city council’s progressives.” In a particularly telling appointment, John Tory chose far-right councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong as deputy mayor and to sit on the boards of Invest Toronto, Build Toronto and Waterfront Toronto — agencies he’s long rallied against for not pushing an expansive enough pro-development-at-all-costs agenda. Furthermore, Minnan-Wong will head the Civic Appointments Committee, charged with overseeing appointments from everything to libraries, community centres and the Toronto Parking Authority, as well as head of the Strike Committee that selects members of Council committees and heads for the labour relations committees that negotiate with the city’s unions. If Minnan-Wong’s long tenure as councillor and his actions during the 2009 and 2012 rounds of bargaining are any indication, far from a new “united Toronto” and Council, Tory has fired the first shots in what may be the opening salvo of class warfare on a level perhaps previously unseen.

Despite a record voter turnout of 61 percent, the consolidated conservative coalition at City Hall also raises concerns about the lack of gender and racial diversity. The proportion of non-white councillours remains the same as it was ten years ago at 13 percent, while the proportion of women serving has fluctuated over that time between a quarter and one-third of total Council seats. Curiously, in a poll released less than a week to go before the election, some 19 percent of Ontario New Democratic Party supporters said they planned to support Doug Ford, while 24 percent said they planned to support John Tory. With 43 percent of provincial New Democratic supporters vowing to cast a ballot for one conservative mayoral candidate or the other, the inability of so-called progressive candidates to craft a message that captures the democratic imagination and counters the neoliberal rhetoric of supposedly post-ideological politics, speaks to the need to rebuild and redefine what is meant by Left politics in an era when the ideological spectrum has shifted so far to the right.

As opposed to social democracy with “sober senses,” then, what is needed is a Left movement made up of labour and social movement dissidents, rooted in the communities they serve, putting forward a vision of engaged democratic participation, social justice and emancipatory politics that offers promise and inspiration to those engaged in struggles of various kinds to create a better local politics and with that a better world. Paradoxically, as David Hulchansky (2014) has argued:

Toronto’s electoral divide, however, is not along partisan political lines. The divisions are based on socio-economic, ethno-cultural and skin colour characteristics … The loss of well-paying unionized job with benefits following free trade agreements, global financial markets, and “efficiencies” in corporations and governments (e.g., contracting-out to firms paying minimum wage) have decimated the once large and growing group in the middle of the income distribution. We have a polarized labour market, with many more at the bottom and a few more at the top.

The class divisions at the heart of the 2014 campaign, much like the class politics in the making of the megacity since 1998 more generally, have much to do with the social exclusions at the core of neoliberal governance arrangements. As John Lorinc (2014) has argued, “Resident associations and business improvement areas wield real clout with councillors, while tenant councils, where they exist, simply do not.” This class exploitation is multifaceted across race, gender, ability, ethnicity, sexuality and other subjectivities, yet has continuously reproduced itself in post-amalgamation Toronto.

As Maps 2 and 3 illustrate, this spatial mismatch is further illustrated through the inverted “T” pattern flowing from north of the city to the south, which emerged more clearly since the 2014 election (Tencer 2014). The inside of the “T,” what Hulchanski (2010) has referred to as City 1, contains most of the city’s wealthiest enclaves and gentrifying areas. City 2, formerly characterized by middle-income earners, has been shrinking rapidly; Ford, Chow and Tory more or less split this area of the city. Doug Ford, however, took nearly all of City 3, Toronto’s low-income, largely immigrant populations excluded from both the “new economy” and public services, particularly transit (Taylor 2014; Haider 2014). Thus, while the cult of personality and public transit dominated the election campaign, this election was as much about declining access to public services and income inequality as it was about urban-suburban voting patterns:

It took thirty years to divide Toronto into three cities. And as this week’s [October 27, 2014] election vividly demonstrated, those social divisions produce a divided voting pattern. Over time, it is possible to incrementally reverse these trends, year after year. But this long-term goal can only occur if city council, and a mayor with a bully pulpit, are willing to not only advocate for change, but also take meaningful steps that will help create a city with fairer opportunities for all, thereby reducing the divide writ large on our electoral map. (Hulchanski 2014)

In this context it is important to recall that Mayor Mel Lastman (1998–2003) used the reduction in federal and provincial transfer funds to municipalities as a political rationale to harmonize downwards wages and increase workplace precarity. Rather than depart from the neoliberal project, Mayor David Miller (2003–2010) sought to bolster competitiveness, enhance entrepreneurial opportunities and promote Toronto as a “global city,” ultimately seeking concessions from workers as a disingenuous trade off against public services. Rob Ford and Council (2010–2014) extended the assault against public services and civic workers by raising user fees, selling off public assets, contracting-out and extracting further concessions from employees. Peck and Ticknell (2012: 248) argue:

Progressive “postneoliberal” strategies will be going nowhere, practically or metaphorically, if they continue to privilege the local over other horizons of action and intervention. Constraining the operation of neoliberalism … at extra-local scales, and making room for the propagation of reciprocal and cooperative extra-local relations (including active sociospatial redistribution, neoliberalism’s antithesis) must be a defining feature of progressive movements beyond market rule.

Building a movement for social change cannot come from the top down, but must arise through collective political struggles across the many cleavages of the working class. This has been organized labour’s, as much as other social movements’, most effective tool for real change. Considering the multiplicity of pressures, time will tell if a major resistance is in the cards.

References

aandc (Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada). 2005. Urban Aboriginal Strategy Pilot Projects Formative Evaluation Final Report. Ottawa: Queen’s Printer.

Access Alliance. 2013. “Where Are the Good Jobs? Ten Case Stories of ‘Working Rough, Living Poor.’” <http://accessalliance.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Summary_Where-are-the-Good-Jobs-Report-2013.pdf>.

aecom-kpmg. 2013. Big Move Implementation Economics: Revenue Tool Profiles. Markham, ON: aecom.

Albo, G. 1994. “Competitive Austerity and the Impasse of Capitalist Employment Policy.” Socialist Register 30, 144–170.

___. 2007. “The Limits of Eco-Localism: Scale, Strategy and Socialism.” Socialist Register 43, 1–27.

Albo, G., and C. Fanelli. 2014. “Austerity Against Democracy: An Authoritarian Phase of Neoliberalism?” Teoria Politica: An International Journal of Theory and Politics 65–88.

Albo, G., S. Gindin and L. Panitch. 2010. In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives. Oakland, CA: PM Press.

Albo, G., D. Langille and L. Panitch (eds.). 1993. A Different Kind of State? Popular Power and Democratic Administration. Toronto: Oxford University Press.

Ali, A.K. 2008. “Greenbelts to Contain Urban Growth in Ontario, Canada: Promises and Prospects.” Planning, Practice and Research 23, 4: 533–548.

amo (Association of Municipalities of Ontario). 2012. Towards a New Federal Long-Term Infrastructure Plan, amo’s Submission to Infrastructure Canada. Toronto: amo.

___. 2014. “Defer Ontario Municipal Partnership Fund Cuts.” August 14. <http://www.amo.on.ca/AMO-Content/Backgrounders/2014/Defer-Ontario-Municipal-Partnership-Fund-%28OMPF%29-Cu.aspx>.

Ayotte-Thompson, M., and L. Freeman. 2012. “Accessibility and Privatization: The Quebec Student Movement.” Social Policy Fall: 1–6.

Azoulay, D. 2000. “The ccf and Post-Second World War Politics in Ontario.” In E.A. Montigny and L. Chambers (eds.), Ontario Since Confederation: A Reader (362–380). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Baines, D. 2004. “Caring for Nothing: Work Organization and Unwaged Labour in Social Services.” Work, Employment and Society 18, 2: 267–295.

___. 2013. “Unions in the Non-Profit Social Services Sector: Gendered Resistance.” In S. Ross and L. Savage (eds.), Public Sector Unions in the Age of Austerity (pp.80–102). Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.

Barber, J. 2014a. “Will Ontario’s Future be Green?” Toronto Star, October 19. <http://www.greenbelt.ca/toronto_star_series_week6_future_2014>.

___. 2014b. “Why John Tory’s ‘SmartTrack’ Isn’t So Smart.” Toronto Star, June 1. <http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2014/06/01/why_john_torys_smarttrack_isnt_so_smart.html>.

Bégin-Caouette, O., and G.A. Jones. 2014. “Student organizations in Canada and Quebec’s ‘Maple Spring’.” Studies in Higher Education 39, 3: 412–425.

Bezanson, K., and M. Luxton (eds.). 2006. Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges Neoliberalism. Montreal & Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Block, S., and G.E. Galabuzi. 2011. Canada’s Colour Coded Labour Market: The Gap for Racialized Workers. Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Boudreau, J.A. 2000. The Megacity Saga. Nova Scotia: Black Rose Books.

Boudreau, J.A., R. Keil and D. Young. 2009. Changing Toronto: Governing Urban Neoliberalism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Bradford, N. 2007. “Placing Social Policy? Reflections on Canada’s New Deal for Cities and Communities.” Canadian Journal of Urban Research 16, 2: 1–26.

Braedley S., and M. Luxton (eds.). 2010. Neoliberalism and Everyday Life. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Brenner, N., and N. Theodore (eds.). 2002a. Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America and Western Europe. Oxford: Blackwell.

___. 2002b. “Cities and the Geographies of ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism’.” Antipode 34, 3: 349–379.

___. 2005. “Neoliberalism and the Urban Condition.” CITY 9, 1: 101–107.

Brenner, N., and R. Keil (eds.). 2006. The Global Cities Reader. New York: Routledge.

Briskin, L. 2013. “In the Public Interest: Nurses on Strike.” In S. Ross and L. Savage (eds.), Public Sector Unions in the Age of Austerity (pp. 91–102). Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.

Broadbent, E. 2008. Urban Nation: Why We Need to Give Power Back to Cities to Make Canada Strong. Toronto: HarperCollins.

Brogan, P. 2014. “Getting to the core of the Chicago Teachers’ Union Transformation.” Studies in Social Justice 8, 2: 145–164.

Camfield, D. 2011. Canadian Labour in Crisis: Reinventing the Workers’ Movement. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.

Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. 2014. “Income Inequality on the Rise, especially in Large Cities.” <https://www.policyalternatives.ca/newsroom/updates/income-inequality-rise-especially-large-cities>.

Carroll, W., and R.S. Ratner (eds.). 2005. Challenges and Perils: Social Democracy in Neoliberal Times. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.

Carson, J., and M. Siemiatycki. 2014. “The Justice and Dignity for Cleaners’ Campaign: Mobilizing Against Precarity in Toronto.” Just Labour: A Canadian Journal of Work and Society 22: 168–185.

Caulfield, J. 1994. City Form and Everyday Life: Toronto’s Gentrification and Critical Social Practice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

___. 2010. “Toronto: The Form of the City.” In H.H. Hiller (ed.), Urban Canada, 2nd edition (324–352). Toronto: Oxford.

cbc. 2000. “Strike Shuts Down Toronto Daycare Centres.” cbc News, March 31. <http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/strike-shuts-down-toronto-daycare-centres-1.227039>.

___. 2010. “Ontario College Teachers Accept Deal, Avert Strike.” .” cbc News, February 24. <http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ontario-college-teachers-accept-deal-avert-strike-1.964255>.

___. 2013. “Rob Ford Stripped of Key Powers in Council Vote.” cbc News, November 15. <http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/rob-ford-stripped-of-key-powers-in-council-vote- 1.2426988>.

___. 2014. “Timeline: Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. cbc News, May 1. <http://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/rob-ford-timeline/>.

cfib (Candian Federation of Independent Businesses). 2013. “Big City Spenders.” May. <http://www.cfib-fcei.ca/cfib-documents/rr3293.pdf>.

Choudry, A., and E. Shragge. 2013. “The 2012 Student Strike: Many Lessons Were Learned and Taught.” Social Policy Spring: 11–14.

Church, E., and P. White. 2011. “Ford’s Plan to Privatize Garbage Collection Passes: With Concessions.” Globe and Mail. <http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/fords-plan-to-privatize-garbage-collection-passes---with-concessions/article4262961/>.

City of Milton. 2007. “Bill 130: Municipal Statute Law Amendment Act, 2006.” <https://www.milton.ca/MeetingDocuments/Council/agendas2007/rpts2007/ES-037-07%20Bill%20130.pdf>.

City of Toronto. 2007. “A Discussion of Public Policy Revenue Tools Under the City of Toronto Act, 2006.” <http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2007/ex/bgrd/backgroundfile-2052.pdf>.

___. 2008. “Blueprint for Fiscal Stability and Economic Prosperity: A Call to Action.” <http://www.buildtoronto.ca/sites/default/files/files/blueprint- highlights(2).pdf>.

___. 2011. “Operating Budget.” <http://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2011/bu/bgrd/backgroundfile-35804.pdf>.

___. 2013. “Operating Budget.” <http://www1.toronto.ca/City%20Of%20Toronto/Strategic%20Communications/City%20Budget/2013/Operating%20Corporate%20Report/operating_summary.pdf>.

___. (n.d.). “Capital Financing, Debt and Credit Rating.” <http://www.toronto.ca/finance/debt.htm>.

Clark, C.S. 1898. Toronto the Good: A Social Study. Montreal: The Toronto Publishing Company.

Clarke, J. 2008. “Out of Sight, Out of Mind.” The Bullet. <http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/bullet134.html>.

clc (Canadian Labour Congress). 2012. “What Did Corporate Tax Cuts Deliver? Background Report for Corporate Tax Freedom Day 2012.” <http://canadianlabour.ca/issues-research/what-did-corporate-tax-cuts-deliver-2013>.

cmhc (Canada Mortgage Housing Corporation). 1999. Alternative Methods of Financing Municipal Infrastructure. Ottawa: cmhc.

Collombat, T. 2014. “Labor and Austerity in Québec: Lessons from the Maple Spring.” Labor Studies Journal 39, 2: 140–159.

Commission on the Reform of Ontario’s Public Services. 2012. Public Services for Ontarians: A Path to Sustainability and Excellence. Government of Ontario.

Conference Board of Canada. 2014. “Business Enterprise R&D.” <http://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/provincial/innovation/berd.aspx>.

Cote, A., and M. Fenn. 2014. Approaching an Inflection Point in Ontario’s Provincial–Municipal Relations. Toronto: Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance.

Creese, G. 2007. “Racializing Work/Reproducing White Privilege.” In V. Shalla and W. Clement (eds.), Work In Tumultuous Times (pp. 192–226). Montreal and Kingston, McGill-Queens University Press.

cspct (Community Social Planning Council of Toronto), University of Toronto Social Assistance in the New Economy Project and the Wellesley Institute. 2009. Sick and Tired: The Compromised Health of Social Assistance Recipients and the Working Poor in Ontario. February. Toronto: cspct.

Dale, D. 2011a. “Council Approves Some Cuts, Rejects Others.” Toronto Star, October 27. <http://www.thestar.com/news/torontocouncil/article/1060430--council-approves-some-cuts-rejects-others>.

___. 2011b. “Ford Says City Employees Are the ‘Gravy’.” Toronto Star, September 15. <http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2011/09/15/ford_says_city_employees_are_the_gravy.html>.

___. 2011c. “Ford Wants to Sell 10% of Hydro.” Toronto Star, October 25. <http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1075440--ford-wants-to-sell-10-of-hydro>.

Dale, D., and T. Boyle. 2012. “City Workers to Get 6% Over Four Years.” Toronto Star, February 13. <http://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2012/02/13/city_workers_to_get_6_pay_hike_over_four_years.html>.

Dean, T. 2013. Reviewer’s Report: Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System Governance Review. Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing.

Deloitte and Touche. 1997. Critique of kpmg Report Fresh Start: An Estimate of Potential Savings and Costs from the Creation of a Single Tier Local Government for Toronto. Toronto: Deloitte and Touche.

Desfor, G., and R. Keil. 2004. Nature and the City: Making Environmental Policy in Toronto and Los Angeles. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Desfor, G., R. Keil, S. Kipfer and G. Wekerle. 2006. “From Surf to Turf: No Limits to Growth in Toronto?” Studies in Political Economy 77: 131–155.

Dewing, M., W. Young and E. Tolley. 2006. Municipalities, the Constitution, and the Canadian Federal System. Ottawa: Library of Parliament.

Donald, B. 2005. “The Politics of Local Economic Development in Canada’s City-Regions: New Dependencies, New Deals, and a New Politics of Scale.” Space and Polity 9, 3: 261–281.

Doolittle, R. 2014. Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story. Toronto: Viking Publishing.

Duffy, A., D. Glenday and N. Pupo (eds.). 1997. Good Jobs, Bad Jobs, No Jobs: The Transformation of Work in the 21st Century. Toronto: Harcourt Brace & Company.

Duménil, G., and D. Lévy. 2001. Capital Resurgent: The Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution. Cambridge, Harvard University Press. eds., The Road to Mont Pelerin (181-203). Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

Evans, B. 2012. “From Protest Movement to Neoliberal Management: Canada’s New Democratic Party in the Era of Permanent Austerity.” In B. Evans and I. Schmidt (eds.), Social Democracy After the Cold War (pp. 45–98). Edmonton: Athabasca University Press.

___. 2013. “When Your Boss Is the State: The Paradoxes of Public Sector Work.” In S. Ross and L. Savage (eds.), Public Sector Unions in the Age of Austerity (pp.18–30). Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.

Evans, B., and G. Albo. 2010. “Permanent Austerity: The Politics of the Canadian Exit Strategy from Fiscal Stimulus.” Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research 22: 7–28.

Evans, B., and J. Shields. 2011. “Farewell to Dr. Keynes.” In P. Dutil (ed.), The Guardian: Perspectives on the Ministry of Finance of Ontario (131–161). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Fanelli, C., and P. Lefebvre. 2011. “The Ottawa and Gatineau Museum Workers’ Strike: Precarious Employment and the Public Sector Squeeze.” In C. Fanelli and P. Lefebvre (eds.), Critical Social Research in Critical Times, Alternate Routes 2012 (pp. 121–145). Ottawa: Red Quill Books.

Fanelli, C., and M.P. Thomas. 2011. “Neoliberalism Redux: Ontario Responds to the Great Recession.” Socialist Studies 7, 1/2: 141–170.

fcm (Federation of Canadian Municipalities). 2003. Alternative Funding Mechanisms: A Best Practice by the National Guide to Sustainable Municipal Infrastructure. Toronto: fcm.

___. 2006. Building Prosperity from the Ground Up: Restoring Municipal Fiscal Balance. Ottawa. fcm.

___. 2012. The State of Canada’s Cities and Communities. Ottawa: fcm.

Ferguson, R. 2014. “Kathleen Wynne Announces Annual $100m Investment in Small Towns.” Toronto Star, August 18. <http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/08/18/wynne_announces_annual_100m_investment_in_small_towns.html>.

Fletcher, B. Jr., and F. Gapasin. 2008. Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward Social Justice. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Forum Research. 2013. “Average Commute in gta is 40 Minutes.” March 1. <https://www.forumresearch.com/forms/News%20Archives/News%20Releases/36186_G TA_-_Transportation_Issues_%28Forum_Research%29_%2820130301%29.pdf>.

Found, A. 2012. Economics of Scale in Fire and Police Services in Ontario. Toronto: Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance.

Frankel, S.J., and R.C. Pratt. 1954. “Municipal Labour Relations in Canada: A Study of Some Problems Arising from Collective Bargaining between Municipalities and Municipal Trade Unions.” Toronto: Canadian Federation of Mayors and Municipalities.

Friskin, F. 1993. “Planning and Servicing the Greater Toronto Area: The Interplay of Provincial and Municipal Interests.” In D. Rothblatt and A. Sancton (eds.), Metropolitan Governance: American/Canadian Intergovernmental Perspectives (pp. 153–204). Berkeley: University of California.

Furlong, K. 2007. “Municipal Water Supply Governance in Ontario: Neoliberalization, Utility Restructuring and Infrastructure Management.” Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia.

Galabuzi, G.E. 2006. Canada’s Economic Apartheid: The Social Exclusion of Racialized Groups in the New Century. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press.

Gee, M. 2014. “John Tory’s Plan Doesn’t Hold Up to Back-of-the-Napkin Scrutiny.” Globe and Mail, October 1. <http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/john-torys-plan-doesnt-hold- up-to-back-of-the-napkin-scrutiny/article20887412/>.

Gellatly, Mary, John Grundy, Kiran Mirchandani, Adam Perry, Mark Thomas and Leah Vosko. 2011. “‘Modernizing’ Employment Standards? Administrative Efficiency, Market Regulation, and the Production of the Illegitimate Claimant in Ontario, Canada.” Economic and Labour Relations Review 22, 2: 81–106.

Gillis, C., and K. Lunau. 2009. “Toronto Stinks.” Macleans, July 22. <http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/toronto-stinks/>.

Gindin, S. 2012. “Rethinking Unions, Registering Socialism.” Socialist Register 49: 26–51.

___. 2013. “Beyond the Economic Crisis: The Crisis in Trade Unionism.” In C. Fanelli and B. Evans (eds.), Great Recession-Proof? Shattering the Myth of Canadian Exceptionalism, Alternate Routes 2013 (pp. 236–245). Ottawa: Red Quill Books.

Global Toronto. 2014. “Half of Torontonians Willing to Pay More to Spend Less Time on ttc.” Global News. <http://globalnews.ca/news/1592998/half-of-torontonians-willing-to-pay- more-to-spend-less-time-on-ttc/>.

Gough, J. 1996. “Neoliberalism and Localism: Comments on Peck and Tickell.” Area 28, 3: 392–398.

Government of Ontario, Association of Municipalities of Ontario-City of Toronto. 2008. Provincial-Municipal Fiscal and Service Delivery Review. Toronto: Queen’s Printer.

Government of Ontario, Ministry of Finance. 1988. Ontario Budget. Toronto: Queen’s Printer.

___. 1995a. Fiscal and Economic Statement. Toronto: Queen’s Printer.

___. 1995b. Fiscal Overview and Spending Cuts. Toronto: Queen’s Printer.

___. 1999. Ontario Budget. Toronto: Queen’s Printer.

___. 2008. Ontario Budget. Queen’s Printer.

___. 2010. “Ontario’s Tax Plan for Jobs and Growth.” Retrieved June 9, 2011, from <http://www.fin.gov.on.ca/en/budget/ontariobudgets/2010/bk_tax.html>.

___. 2013. Ontario Budget. Toronto: Queen’s Printer.

Government of Ontario, Ministry of Infrastructure. 2012. Places to Grow: Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe. Toronto: Queen’s Printer.

Government of Ontario, Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing. 2009. Sustainability: The Intersection of Land Use Planning and Food. Toronto: Queen’s Printer.

Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections for the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers.

Grant, K. 2012. “Ford Team Set Tone for Municipal Labour Talks.” Globe and Mail, April 16. <http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/ford-team-set-tone-for-municipal-labour-talks/article4170538/>.

Grewel, S. 2011. “Is It Bad for Cities to Be in Debt? Not Necessarily.” Toronto Star, August 14. Retrieved August 3 2013, from <http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2011/08/14/is_it_bad_for_cities_to_be_in_debt_not_necessarily.html>.

gta Task Force. 1996. “Report of the gta Task Force.” Government of Ontario.

Hackworth, J. 2007. The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology and Development in American Urbanism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

___. 2008. “The Durability of Roll-Out Neoliberalism Under Centre-Left Governance.” Studies in Political Economy 81: 7–26.

Haider, M. 2014. “Toronto Is a City Divided into the Haves, Will Haves and Have Nots.” Huffington Post, October 30. <http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/murtaza-haider/toronto-mayoral- race_b_6071726.html>.

Hanes, A. 2008. “Property Tax Cuts ‘Right Thing to Do’.” National Post, May 9. Retrieved from <http://ward20.ca/news_article.php?article=224&cal_month=4&cal_year=2016>.

Harden, J. 2013. Quiet No More: New Political Activism in Canada and Around the Globe. Toronto: Lorimer.

Harmes, A. 2006. “Neoliberalism and Multilevel Governance.” Review of International Political Economy 13, 5: 725–749.

Harvey, D. 1996. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell.

___. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

___. 2008. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review 53. <http://newleftreview.org/II/53/david- harvey-the-right-to-the-city>.

___. 2009. Social Justice and the City. Georgia: University of Georgia Press.

___. 2013. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso.

Henirich, E. 2012. “Toronto to Overtake London as a Hub for Bankers.” Global Finance, January 6. <https://www.gfmag.com/magazine/january-2012/toronto-to-overtake-london-as-a-hub-for-bankers>.

Hjartarson, J., K. Hinton and M. Szala. 2011. Putting Canada on Track: A Blueprint for a National Framework. Toronto: University of Toronto Mowat Centre for Policy Innovation.

Hopcroft, G. 1991. Report of the Advisory Committee to the Minister of Municipal Affairs on the Provincial-Municipal Financial Relationship. Government of Ontario.

Hulchanski, D.J. 2010. The Three Cities Within Toronto: Income Polarization Among Toronto’s Neighbourhoods, 1970–2005. Toronto: University of Toronto Cities Centre.

___. 2014. “Toronto’s Mayoral Election in Four Maps.” Spacing Toronto, October 29. <http://spacing.ca/toronto/2014/10/29/torontos-mayoral-election-four-maps/>.

Hume, C. 2011. “Cuts Loom as Budget Season Kicks Off.” Toronto Star, July 11. <http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1023213--hume-cuts-loom-as-budget-season- kicks-off>.

Hurley, M., and S. Gindin. 2011. “The Assault on Public Services: Will Unions Lament the Attacks or Lead a Fightback?” The Bullet, June 14. <http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/516.php>.

Inside Toronto Editorial. 2008. “City Hall: Council Grants Woodbine Project Massive Tax-Break.” July 17. Retrieved December 18, 2013, from <http://www.insidetoronto.com/news- story/25381-city-hall-council-grants-woodbine-project-massive-tax-break/>.

James, R. 2011. “Fact and Fiction in City Finances.” Toronto Star, November 4. <http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1081654--james-fact-and-fiction-in-city- finances>.

Jenson, J., and M. Sineau. 2001. Who Cares? Women’s Work, Child Care, and Welfare State Redesign. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Kealey, GS. 1995. Workers and Canadian History. Montreal: McGill-Queens Press.

Keenan, E. 2014. “John Tory Appointments Put an End to the Idea of Unity.” Toronto Star, December 1. <http://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2014/12/01/john_tory_appointments_put_an_end _to_the_idea_of_unity_keenan.html?utm_medium=twitter>.

Keil, R. 1998. “Toronto in the 1990s. Dissociated Governance?” Studies in Political Economy 56: 151–167.

___. 2000. “Third Way Urbanism: Opportunity or Dead-End?” Alternatives 25: 247–267.

___. 2002. “Common-Sense” Neoliberalism: Progressive Conservatism in Toronto, Canada.” Antipode 34, 3): 578–601.

Kipfer, S. 1998. “Urban Politics in the 1990s: Notes on Toronto.” In R. Wolff, A Schneider, C. Schmid, P. Klaus, A. Hofer and H. Hitz (eds.), Possible Urban Worlds: Urban Strategies at the End of the 20th Century (172–179). Basel: Birkhauser.

___. 2007. “Mayor Miller and Toronto’s Suburbs: Colonization and Competition.” New Socialist 60: 28–29.

___. 2010. “The Hordes at the Gate? Hard-Right Populism Defines Toronto Mayoral Election.” The Bullet. <http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/419.php>.

Kipfer, S., and R. Keil. 2002. “Toronto Inc? Planning the Competitive City in the New Toronto.” Antipode 34, 2: 227–264.

Kipfer, S., and J. Petrunia. 2009. “‘Recolonization’ and Public Housing: A Toronto Case.” Studies in Political Economy 83: 111–139.

Kipfer, S., and P. Saberi. 2014. “From ‘Revolution’ to Farce? Hard-Right Populism in the Making of Toronto.” Studies in Political Economy 93: 127–151.

Kohler, N. 2010a. “How Rob Ford Won Toronto.” Macleans. <http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/10/29/the-game-changer/>.

___. 2010b. “The Political Genius of Rob Ford.” Macleans. Retrieved from <http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/10/12/the-political-genius-of-rob-ford/>.

Kozolanka, K. 2007. The Power of Persuasion: The Politics of the New Right in Ontario. Montreal: Black Rose Books.

kpmg. 1996. Fresh Start: An Estimate of Potential Savings and Costs from the Creation of a Single Tier Local Government for Toronto. Toronto: kpmg.

___. 2011. Core Services Review. Retrieved from <http://www.toronto.ca/torontoservicereview/results.htm>.

Krawchencko, T., and C. Stoney. 2011. “Public Private Partnership and the Public Interest: A Case Study of Ottawa’s Lansdowne Park Development.” Canadian Journal of Nonprofit and Social Economy Research 2, 2: 74–90.

Kushner, J., and D. Siegal. 2003. “Effect of Municipal Amalgamations on Political Representation and Accessibility.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 36, 5: 1035–1051.

Lankin, F., and M.A. Sheikh. 2012. Brighter Prospects: Transforming Social Assistance in Ontario. A Report to the Minister of Community and Social Services. Government of Ontario.

Laycock, D. 2002. The New Right and Democracy in Canada: Understanding Reform and Canadian Alliance. Toronto: Oxford University Press.

Leitner, H., and E. Sheppard. 1998. “Economic Uncertainty, Interurban Competition and the Efficacy of Entrepreneurialism.” In T. Hall and P. Hubbard (eds.), The Entrepreneurial City: Geographies of Politics, Regime and Representation (285–308). New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Lemon, J. 1985. Toronto Since 1918. Toronto: James Lorimer Press.

Levy, S. 2009a. “Trash Talk Was Easy in ’02.” Toronto Sun, June 30. <http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/sueann_levy/2009/06/30/9977911-sun.html>.

___. 2009b. “Injunction Junction Strikeout.” Toronto Sun, July 16. <http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/sueann_levy/2009/07/16/10150521-sun.html>.

___. 2011. “Trash Plan a Slam Dunk.” Toronto Sun, May 15. <http://www.torontosun.com/2011/05/13/levy-trash-plan-a-slam-dunk>.

Lewchuk, W., M. Clarke and A. De Wolff. 2011. Working Without Commitments: The Health Effects of Precarious Employment. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen Press.

Livesey, B. 2012. Thieves of Bay Street: How Banks, Brokerages and the Wealthy Steal Billions From Canadians. Toronto: Random House.

Local 79 Member. 2014. Interview, November 14.

Lorinc, J. 2014. “Class Divisions at Heart of this Campaign.” Spacing Toronto, October 14. <http://spacing.ca/toronto/2014/10/14/lorinc-class-division-issues-heart-campaign/>.

Low, A.R. 1948. “How Good Is ‘Toronto the Good’?” Baltimore Afro-American, April 20. <http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=HPklAAAAIBAJ&sjid=gvUFAAAAIBAJ&pg= 2109%2c2019151>.

Loxley, J. 2010. Public Service, Private Profits: The Political Economy of Public-Private Partnerships in Canada. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.

Lyderson, K. 2013. Mayor 1%: Rahm Emmanuel and the Rise of Chicago’s 99%. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

MacDermid, R., and G. Albo. 2001. “Divided Province, Growing Protests: Ontario Moves Right.” In K. Brownsey and M. Howlett (eds.), The Provincial State in Canada: Politics in the Provinces and Territories (163–202). Toronto: Broadview Press.

Macdonald, S., and R. Keil. 2012. “The Ontario Greenbelt: Shifting the Scales of the Sustainability Fix?” The Professional Geographer 64, 1: 125–145.

Mackenzie, H. 2014. “Tackling Ontario’s Public Services Deficit.” February 3. <http://behindthenumbers.ca/2014/02/03/tackling-ontario-public-services-deficit/>.

Maloney, P. 2011a. “City Headed Toward $140 Million Thanks to Tax Ford Wants to Scrap.” Toronto Star, October 11. <http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1067830--city-headed-for-140m-surplus-thanks-to-tax-ford-wants-to-scrap>.

___. 2011b. “City Budget Gap Exaggerated, Critics Say.” Toronto Star, July 17. <http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1026208--city-budget-gap-exaggerated-critics-say>.

Mann, M. 1973. Consciousness and Action Among the Western Working Class. London: Macmillan.

McBride, S. 2001. Paradigm Shift: Globalization and the Canadian State. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.

McBride, S., and J. Shields. 1997. Dismantling a Nation: The Transition to Corporate Rule in Canada, second edition. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.

McDonough, P., D. Worts, B. Fox and K. Dmitrienk. 2008. “Restructuring Municipal Government: Labour-Management Relations and Workers Mental Health.” Canadian Review of Sociology 45, 2: 197–219.

McKie, D. 2013. “Ring of Fire Mining May Not Benefit First Nations as Hoped.” cbc, June 27. <http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ring-of-fire-mining-may-not-benefit-first-nations-as- hoped-1.1374849>.

McMahon, T. 2014. “Charting’s Toronto’s Uneven Housing Bubble.” Maclean’s, July 22. <http://www.macleans.ca/economy/realestateeconomy/charting-torontos-uneven-housing- bubble/>.

McNally, D. 2011. Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance. Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing.

Metrolinx. 2008. Costs of Road Congestion in the Grater Toronto and Hamilton Area: Impact and Cost Benefit Analysis of the Metrolinx Draft Regional Transportation Plan. Toronto: Greater Toronto Transportation Authority.

___. 2013. The Big Move: Transforming Transportation in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. Toronto: Government of Ontario.

Mirowski, P. 2014. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. London: Verso.

Montebraaten, L. 2011. “400,000 Rely on Food Banks Each Month in Ontario.” Toronto Star, March 22. <http://www.thestar.com/news/article/957658--400-000-rely-on-food- banks-each-month-inontario>.

Moody, K. 1997. Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy. London: Verso Press.

Moore, A.A. 2013. “Trading Density for Benefits: Section 37 Agreements in Toronto.” Institute of Municipal Finance and Governance 2: 1–11.

Moussauoi, R. 2013a. “Dealing with Developers: Municipal Bonusing Spurs Debate.” cbc, April 25. Retrieved July 19, 2013 from <http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/story/2013/04/25/toronto-section-37.html>.

___. 2013b. “Battle Brewing Over Toronto’s Development Charges.” cbc, May 9. Retrieved September 10, 2013 from <http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/story/2013/05/08/toronto-development-cost- charges.html>.

Myles, J., G. Picot and W. Pyper. 2000. “Neighbourhood Inequality in Canadian Cities.” Statistics Canada. <http://publications.gc.ca/collections/Collection/CS11-0019-160E.pdf>.

Noonen, J. 2012. “Academic Freedom Endangered in Ontario.” Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives: The Monitor. <http://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/monitor/academic-freedom-endangered-ontario>.

ocufa (Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations). 2012. “ocufa Analysis of the Drummond Report: Long on Cuts, Short on Insight.” <http://utlibrarians.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/ocufa-drummond-report-analysis-feb-22-2012-final.pdf>.

omers (Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System). 2014. “Managing Risk to Earn More Consistent Long-term Returns.” <http://www.omers.com/pdf/Backgrounder_2013_Returns.pdf>.

Ontario Auditor General. 2014. Annual Report of the Office of the Auditor General of Ontario. Toronto: Queen’s Printer.

Panitch, L., and S. Gindin. 2012. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. London: Verso.

Panitch, L., and D. Swartz. 2003. From Consent to Coercion: The Assault on Trade Union Freedoms. Aurora, ON, Garamond Press.

Peat, D. 2014. “Toronto Taxpayers’ Group Targets Chow.” Toronto Sun, September 4. <http://www.torontosun.com/2014/09/03/toronto-taxpayers-group-targets-chow>.

Peck, J. 2010. Constructions of Neoliberal Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

___. 2012. “Austerity Urbanism: American Cities under Extreme Economy.” CITY 16, 6: 626–655.

___. 2013. “Pushing Austerity: State Failure, Municipal Bankruptcy, and the Crises of Fiscal Federalism in the USA.” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 7, 1: 17–44.

Peck, J., N. Theodore and N. Brenner. 2013. “Neoliberal Urbanism Redux?” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37, 3: 1091–1099.

Peck, J. and A. Tickell. 1994. “Jungle Law Breaks Out: Neoliberalism and Global-Local Disorder.” Area 26, 4: 317–326.

___. 2002. “Neoliberalizing Space.” Antipode 34, 3: 380–404.

___. 2012. “Apparitions of Neoliberalism: Revisiting ‘Jungle Law Breaks Out’.” Area 44, 2: 245–249.

Pembina Institute. 2012. “Driver’s Choice: Options to Manage Gridlock and Fund Rapid Transit in the gta.” <http://www.pembina.org/reports/drivers-choice-gta-report.pdf>.

pepso. 2014. “It’s More than Poverty: Employment Precarity and Household Well-Being.” <http://pepsouwt.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/its-more-than-poverty-feb-2013.pdf>.

Pierson, R.R., and M.G. Cohen. 1995. Women’s Issues, Volume II: Bold Visions, Twenty-Five Years of Women’s Activism in English Canada. Toronto: James Lorimer and Company.

Pond, D. 2009. “Ontario’s Greenbelt: Growth Management, Farmland Protection, and Regime Change in Southern Ontario.” Canadian Public Policy 35, 4: 413–432.

Pupo, N., and A. Noack. 2010. “Dialing for Service: Transforming the Public-Sector Workplace in Canada.” In N. Pupo and M. Thomas (eds.), Interrogating the New Economy: Restructuring Work in the 21st Century (pp. 111–128). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Pupo, N., and M. Thomas (eds.). 2010. Interrogating the New Economy: Restructuring Work in the 21st Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Ray, R. 2000. “Municipal Workers Strike in Toronto.” The Militant 64, 15 (April 17). <http://www.themilitant.com/2000/6415/641503.html>.

rccao (Residential and Civil Construction Alliance of Ontario). 2010. Public Infrastructure Underinvestment: The Risk to Canada’s Economic Growth. Toronto: RiskAnalytica.

Rider, D. 2011. “Team Ford Set to Give Go-Ahead to Gravy-Sniffing Consultants.” Toronto Star, March 19. <http://www.thestar.com/news/article/956831--team-ford-set-to-approve-hiring-of-gravy-sniffing-consultants>.

___. 2012. “Strike Averted: City and Outside Workers Reach Tentative Agreement.” Toronto Star, February 5. <http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2012/02/05/strike_averted_city_and_outside_workers_reach_tentative_agreement.html>.

Ridler, M., and P. Maloney. 2011. “Toronto Votes to Contract-out Garbage Pick Up.” Toronto Star. May 17. <http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2011/05/17/toronto_votes_to_contract_out_garbage_pickup.html>.

Roberts, W. 1994. Don’t Call Me Servant: Government Work and Union in Ontario, 1911–1984. Toronto: Ontario Public Service.

Root, J., E. Gates-Gasse, J. Shields and H. Bauder. 2014. “Discounting Immigrant Families: Neoliberalism and the Framing of Canadian Immigration Policy Change — A Literature Review.” rcis Working Paper No. 2014/7. Toronto: Ryerson Centre for Immigration and Settlement.

Rosen and Associates. 2011. “The City of Toronto’s Proposal to Contract-out Certain Waste Collection Services.” <http://local416.com/images/stories/tceu%20report002.pdf>.

Ross, S. 2005. “The Making of cupe: Structure, Democracy and Class Formation.” Unpublished doctoral dissertation, York University, Toronto.

Ross, S., and L. Savage (eds.) 2013. Public Sector Unions in the Age of Austerity. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.

Roy, M., N. Sidhu and B. Wilson. 2014. The Economy and Resilience of Newcomers: Exploring Newcomer Entrepreneurship. Toronto: Social Planning Toronto.

Saberi, P., and S. Kipfer. 2010. “Rob Ford in Toronto: Why the Ascendancy of Hard-Right Populism in the 2010 Mayoral Election?” New Socialist Webzine. <http://newsocialist.org/webzine/analysis/314-rob-ford-in-toronto-why-the-ascendancy-of-hard-right-populism-in-the-2010-mayoral-election>.

Sanberg, L.A., G.R. Wekerle and L. Gilbert. 2013. The Oak Ridges Moraine Battles: Development, Sprawl and Nature Conservation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Sancton, A. 1996. “Reducing Costs by Consolidating Municipalities: New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Ontario.” Canadian Public Administration 39, 3: 267–289.

___. 2000. Merger Mania: The Assault on Local Government. Montreal and Kingston: McGill University Press.

Sanger, T. 2011a. Garbage In, Garbage Out: The Real Costs of Solid Waste Collection. Ottawa: cupe.

___. 2011b. Fair Shares: How Banks, Brokers and the Financial Industry Can Pay Fairer Taxes. Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Sassen, S. 2005. “The Global City: Introducing a Concept.” Brown Journal of World Affairs 11, 2): 27–43.

Scarth, W. 2014. “User Discretion Advised: Fiscal Consolidation and the Recovery.” CD Howe Institute, <http://www.cdhowe.org/pdf/Commentary_412.pdf>.

Sears, A. 1999. “The ‘Lean’ State and Capitalist Restructuring: Towards a Theoretical Account.” Studies in Political Economy 59: 91–114.

Selley, C. 2011. “Ford’s Campaign Mantra Runs Out of Gas.” National Post, July 13. <http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/07/13/comment-fords-campaign-mantra-runs- out-of- gas/>.

Sharzer, G. 2012. No Local — Why Small-Scale Alternatives Won’t Change the World. Winchester, UK. Zero Books.

Shepherd, T. 2013. “Woodbine Live! Project Folds.” Etobicoke Guardian, February 6. Retrieved September 24, 2013, from <http://www.insidetoronto.com/news-story/1938938-woodbine-live-project-folds/>.

Siegal, D. 2004. “Recent Changes in Provincial-Municipal Relations in Ontario: A New Era or a Missed Opportunity.” In R. Young and C. Leuprecht (eds.), Municipal–Federal–Provincial Relation in Canada. Montreal & Kingston: McGill University Press.

Siemiatycki, M., and N. Farooqi. 2012. “Value for Money and Risk in Public-Private Partnerships.” Journal of the American Planning Association 78, 3: 286–299.

Skaburskis, A., and R. Tomalty. 1997. “Land Value Taxation and Development Activity: The Reaction of Toronto and Ottawa Developers, Planners and Municipal Finance Officials.” Canadian Journal of Regional Science 20, 3: 401–417.

Slack, E., and R.M. Bird. 2013. “Merging Municipalities: Is Bigger Better?” imfg Paper No.14. Toronto: University of Toronto Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance.

Slack, E., and A. Cote. 2014. Is Toronto Fiscally Healthy? A Check-up on the City’s Finances. Toronto: Institute for Municipal Finance and Governance.

Slack, E., H. Kitchen, M. McMillan and F. Vaillancourt. 2007. “Roles, Responsibilities, Resources and Relationships.” Report to the Provincial and Territorial Municipal Associations.

Slack, E., A. Tassonyi and D. Grad. 2014. “Fiscal Health of Ontario Large Cities: Is There Something to Worry About?” Toronto: Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance.

Solty, I. 2012. “Canada’s ‘Maple Spring’: from the Quebec Student Strike to the Movement Against Neoliberalism.” The Bullet 752 <http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/752.php>.

Spicer, Z. 2011. “The Rise and Fall of the Ministry of State for Urban Affairs: A Reevaluation.” Canadian Political Science Review 5, 2: 117–126.

Stanford, J. 2008. “Toronto Fiscal Plan: A View From Inside.” Progressive Economics Forum, March 2. <http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2008/03/02/toronto-fiscal- panel-the-view-from-inside/>.

___. 2011. Having Their Cake and Eating It Too: Business Profits, Taxes, and Investment in Canada: 1961 Through 2010. Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

___. 2013. “Unifor: Canada’s Newest Union.” Rabble, September 4. <http://rabble.ca/columnists/2013/09/unifor-canadas-newest-union>.

Stapleton, J., B. Murphy and Y. Xing. 2012. The “Working Poor” in the Toronto Region. February. Toronto: Metcalf Foundation.

Statistics Canada. 2013a. “Revenue, Expenditure and Budgetary Balance – General Government and Local General Government (cansim Table 380-0080).” <http://www5.statcan.gc.ca/cansim/a26?lang=eng&id=3800080>.

___. 2013b. “Consumer Price Index (cansim Table 326-0020).” <http://www5.statcan.gc.ca/cansim/a26?lang=eng&id=3260020>.

___. 2013c. “Government Finance Statistics, Statement of Government Operations and Balance Sheet (cansim Table 385-0032).” <http://www5.statcan.gc.ca/cansim/a26?lang=eng&id=3850032>.

___. 2013d. “Gross Domestic Product, Income-Based (cansim Table 380-0063).” <http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/gdps01a-eng.htm>.

___. 2013e. “Survey of Employment, Payrolls and Hours, Average Weekly Earnings by Type of Employee, Overtime Status and Detailed North American Industry Classification System (cansim Table 281-0027).” <http://www5.statcan.gc.ca/cansim/a26?lang=eng&id=2810027>.

Stedman Jones, D. 2012. Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Stinson, J. 2010. “Labour Casualization in the Public Sector.” In N. Pupo and M. Thomas (eds.), Interrogating the New Economy: Restructuring Work in the 21st Century (pp. 93–110). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Stoney, C., and K.A.H. Graham. 2009. “Federal-Municipal Relations in Canada. The Changing Organizational Landscape.” Canadian Public Administration 52, 3: 371–394.

suda (Sustainable Urban Development Association). 2011. “Places to Grow: Still Unsustainable.” Mississauga, ON: suda.

Tapper, J. 2012. “Billions Needed to Save Canadian Roads, Water Systems, Report Says.” Toronto Star, September 11. Retrieved July 25, 2013, from <http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2012/09/11/billions_needed_to_save_canadian_roads_water_systems_report_says.html>.

Taylor, N. 2014. “Organizing Strategies in the Quebec Student Strikes and the ‘Maple Spring’ Protests.” Social Policy Fall: 7–16.

tcsa (Toronto City Summit Alliance). 2010. “Transportation and Other Infrastructure Working Group Discussion Paper: Time to Get Serious, Reliable Funding for gtha Transit/Transportation Infrastructure.” Toronto: tcsa.

tea (Toronto Environmental Alliance). 2011. “Look Before You Leap: An Environmental Perspective on Privatizing Waste Collection in Toronto.” Toronto: tea.

Tencer, D. 2014. “Forget Suburbs vs. City, Toronto Is Now Divided Along Income Lines.” Huffington Post, October 28. <http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/daniel-tencer/toronto-election- income-gap_b_6058702.html>.

Thomas, M.P. 2009. Regulating Flexibility: The Political Economy of Employment Standards. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Thomas-Muller, C. (n.d.). “The Rise of the Native Rights-Based Strategic Framework, Idle No More.” Retrieved June 22 2013, from <http://www.idlenomore.ca/the_rise_of_the_native_rights_based_strategic_framework>.

Tjepkema, M., R. Wilkins and A. Long. 2014. “Cause-Specific Mortality by Income Adequacy in Canada: A 16-Year Follow-up Study.” Statistics Canada. <http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-003-x/2013007/article/11852-eng.htm>.

Todd, G. 1998. “Megacity: Globalization and Governance in Toronto.” Studies in Political Economy 56: 193–216.

Toronto Environmental Alliance/ttc Riders. 2011. “Clearing the Air on the ttc.” <http://www.torontoenvironment.org/campaigns/transit/clearingtheair>.

Toronto Star. 2014. “Rob Ford Crack Scandal Timeline.” Toronto Star, November 14. <http://www.thestar.com/yourtoronto/robford/rob_ford_crack_scandal_timeline.html>.

Transport Canada. 2009. “Compendium of Canadian Survey Research on Consumer Attitudes and Behavioural Influences Affecting Sustainable Transportation Options.” March. <http://www.fcm.ca/Documents/tools/GMF/Transport_Canada/CompendiumResearchSustainableTranspo_EN.pdf>.

trbot (Toronto Region Board of Trade). 2013. “A Green Light to Moving the Toronto Region: Paying for Public Transportation Expansion.” Toronto: trbot.

Tufts, S. 2004. “Building the ‘Competitive City’: Labour and Toronto’s Bid to Host the Olympic Games.” Geoforum 35: 47–58.

___. 2007. “Emerging Labour Strategies in Toronto’s Hotel Sector: Toward a Spatial Circuit of Union Renewal.” Environment and Planning A 39, 10: 2383–2404.

Turner, L., and D. Cornfield (eds.). 2007. Labor in the New Urban Battlegrounds: Local Solidarity in a Global Economy. Ithaca: Corneall University Press/ILR Press.

Uetricht, M. 2014. Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity. London: Verso.

University of Toronto Mowat Centre for Policy Innovation-kpmg. 2009. “Tough Choices Ahead: The Future of the Public Sector.” Toronto: Mowat Centre.

Vincent, D. 2011. “Toronto Community Housing Approves Sale of 706 Houses.” Toronto Star, October 21. <http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1074258--toronto-community-housing- approves-sale-of-706-houses>.

Vining, A.R., and A.E. Boardman. 2008. “Public-Private Partnerships in Canada: Theory and Evidence.” Canadian Public Administration 51, 1: 9–44.

Vosko L.F. (ed.). 2006. Precarious Employment: Understanding Labour Market Insecurity in Canada. Montreal & Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Walker, G. 1994. “Planning the Future of Rural Toronto: Structure Planning in the Greater Toronto Area.” Great Lakes Geographer 1, 2: 53–66.

Walkom, T. 1994. Rae Days: The Rise and Fall of the ndp. Toronto: Key Porter.

Walks, A. 2013. “Income Inequality and Polarization in Canada’s Cities: An Examination and New Form of Measurement.” Cities Centre Research Paper 227, August. <http://citiescentre.webservices.utoronto.ca/Assets/Cities+Centre+2013+Digital+Assets/Cities+Centre/Cities+Centre+Digital+Assets/pdfs/publications/Research+Papers/227+Walks+Income+Inequality+Canada+Aug+2013.pdf>.

Walks, R.A., and R. Maaranen. 2008. “The Timing, Patterning and Forms of Gentrification and Neibourhood Upgrading in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, 1961–2001.” Toronto: University of Toronto Cities Centre.

Warren, RM. 2013. “Politicians Ignore Creative Ways to Fund Our Infrastructure.” Toronto Star, March 19. Retrieved July 30, 2013, from <http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2013/03/19/politicians_ignore_creative_ways_to_fund_our_crumbling_infrastructure.html>.

Warskett, R. 2013. “Federal Public Sector Unions in Times of Austerity: Linking Structure and Strategic Choice.” In S. Ross and L. Savage (eds.), Public Sector Unions in the Age of Austerity (pp. 126–138). Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.

Wellesley Institute. 2014. Shadow Economies: Economic Survival Strategies of Toronto Immigrant Communities. Toronto: Wellesley Institute.

White, P. 2011. “Toronto to Offer New Buyout Package to Nearly All City Workers.” Globe and Mail, July 11. <http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/toronto-to-offer-new-buyout- package-to-nearly-all-city-workers/article2094077/>.

Whittington, L. 2011. “Tax Cuts Drive Harper’s Right-Wing Agenda.” Toronto Star, January 19. Retrieved July 14, 2012 from <http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/924121--tax-cuts-drive-harper-s-right-wing-agenda?bn=1>.

Williams, R. 1989. Resources of Hope. London: Verso Press.

Workman, T. 2009. If You’re in My Way, I’m Walking: The Assault on Working People Since 1970. Halifax, Fernwood Publishing.

Worts, D., B. Fox and P. McDonough. 2007. “‘Doing Something Meaningful’: Gender and Public Service During Municipal Government Restructuring.” Gender, Work and Organization 14, 2: 162–184.

York Region. 2013. “Capital: Business Plan and Budget.” York Region.

Index

amalgamation, 17, 25, 30

austerity, 4, 14, 28, 44, 50

Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), 18, 48

Local 79, 1, 31, 47, 56

Local 416, 1, 31, 57

Local 4948, 64

Chicago Teachers Union, 87

Chow, Olivia, 92

City of Toronto Act, 25, 34

class, 3, 15, 54, 61, 96

collective bargaining, 32, 56, 67

concessions, 27, 31, 36, 49, 57

community activists, 48, 62, 80

Core Services Review, 52

devolution, 24

federal, 19, 27, 37

Fewer Municipal Politicians Act, 25

fiscal crisis, 68, 91

Ford Rob, 50, 57, 62

gendered labour, 12, 81

global cities, 29

Great Recession, 4, 44

Greater Golden Horseshoe, 40

Greenbelt Act, 41

Harris, Mike 23

Independent Fiscal Review Panel, 36, 54, 69

infrastructure deficit, 45, 70, 91

intergovernmental transfers, 39

labour market segmentation, 12

Lastman, Mel, 30

localism, 76

Maple Spring, 88

Miller, David, 32, 46

militant particularism, 63

Municipal Statute Law Amendment Act, 38

neoliberalism, 10, 15

Open Ontario Plan, 44

Places to Grow Act, 41

privatization, 12, 35, 41, 50, 80

property tax, 19, 27, 30

Provincial-Municipal Fiscal and Service Delivery Review, 39

public administration, 27, 53

public investment, 74, 79

public-private partnerships, 33

Public Service Alliance of Canada Local 70396, 84

Rae, Bob, 20

racialized labour, 12, 33, 81

revenue tools, 34, 71

social justice, 80, 90

strike, 18, 31, 47, 57

tax cuts, 13, 23, 41, 44, 50, 71, 79

Third Way, 31, 93

three cities, 96

Tory, John, 92