Time to Say "No" Toronto

Canadians, aren’t very good at saying "no." We are much better at compromise. An approach which works great... until it doesn't.

Toronto has grappled with a perennial identity crisis, trying to decide between old-world charm and new-world ambition. Today’s city reflects both the desire to join its American peers as an epicenter of wealth and industry and the allure of old-world commitments to community, culture, and quality of life.

It wasn't easy, but through ambitious planning and a strong tradition of civic advocacy, the city once known as "Hogtown" managed to maintain a delicate balance between culture, commerce, and livability that most cities could only dream of.

Even though Toronto doesn't do culture like Paris or Milan, or business like London or New York, it's always been known as a great place to live, with a little bit of everything and a lot to love.

But Toronto’s last golden moment was a decade ago, a four-year stretch from 2013 to 2017 when we ranked within the top five on The Economist’s Livability Index. These days, Toronto hasn't just fallen out of the top five most livable cities; we don’t even make the top ten.

To the city's residents, this decline comes as no surprise. The city is being stretched so thin the cracks can no longer be papered over, and the consequences are bleeding through. We’ve witnessed a severe lack of housing, an affordability crisis, crippling congestion, inadequate infrastructure, and an overburdened, underfunded social services network.

Socially, our shrinking middle class is giving up on its dreams of homeownership and settling for indefinite wage slavery, made palatable by their consumptive habits. Meanwhile, we’ve inadvertently created an underclass of educated immigrants who were promised financial opportunity and a high standard of living but who are instead stuck in the unrelenting grind of gig work.

Policy wonks and think tanks blame unsustainable immigration, a failure to invest in infrastructure, and a national productivity crisis as the reason why quality of life is declining. But their solution is to increase or adjust government spending, or reduce taxes — the "common-sense solutions" that always seem to create new problems.

The real issue is that the problems faced by City Hall are downstream from an Ottawa bubble focused only on top-line numbers and quantitative metrics, comfortably removed from the consequences of their choices. Meanwhile, Canada’s largest city and the engine of the nation’s economy has no means of determining its own destiny, or its density, for that matter.

The city does, of course, get special attention from the province, in exchange for the right to run roughshod over municipal agendas and planning whenever it feels like doing so. But that feels more like a trade-off than genuine municipal relief.

All of this means Toronto City Council is caught between the desires of its constituents and problems it didn’t create, stuck with responsibilities it can only say “yes” to.

And what's worse? The solution to everything is more. The expectation from higher levels of government has always been: more. And it’s that obsession with more that perpetuates crisis.

It’s the promise of more jobs, more transit, more welfare, more housing — more everything — that makes people feel they have to stay. It may be a narrative that wins elections, but promising more is not a real solution.

We justify this "always more" approach through pretensions of being a "world-class city." But becoming a great city doesn’t automatically mean we’ll be a good city.

City-building has never been a competitive sport. Nor should it be. And by indulging in this narrative of our need to succeed at a global scale, we’ve continually overburdened ourselves.

We’re not New York, or London, or Paris. Yet we’re taking on their problems.

We're trying to provide adequate services, maintain livability, solve a housing crisis; manage crowded schools, hospitals, and shelters; handle transit delays and crumbling roads. And at the same time, we're attempting improve the city experience for those who live, work, and visit.

Toronto is desperate for a reset. A moment of clarity.

A chance to focus on the challenges of today, lay new foundations, and let the future take care of itself.
The only thing Toronto hasn’t tried is saying no.

The word "no" carries the bitterness of rejection, which can make it hard to say and even harder to hear. But the word "no" actually has a powerful double meaning. It's another way of saying "yes" to ourselves. Many people don't realize that the other side of outward rejection is inward commitment — that we affirm when we say no to something. It’s more often than not a necessary step toward becoming our best selves.

That's not just true for people — it's true for a city.

After all, that’s the advice you’d give to anyone burning out from saying yes to everything.

So what if Toronto said, “no more”?
What if everyone knew — truly knew — that this is it?
That what we have now is all we’ll have for the next ten years?
No more shoebox condos.
No more empty office towers.
No more “progress.”

I want to know what people would do with that certainty.

Would they move? Would they seek new opportunities in growing cities and other provinces? Or would they stay and become the backbone of a generation committed to building better lives for themselves, their families, and their communities?

Real progress requires public buy-in, and it’s impossible to maintain the public’s trust when it’s clear they have no agency. It goes against the very idea of multi-level representative democracy we’re taught. And part of the reason we are where we are is because the attitude of compromise between people and government that once made this city one of the most attractive destinations in the world has pretty much disappeared.

The lack of a mechanism for municipalities to say "no" is the underlying pressure that drives NIMBYism. In my opinion that word is a slur for people who say no. Obviously, you can’t be opposed to everything. Investing in transit, infrastructure, housing, and amenities are all part of what cities need to be healthy and mature organically, and you need to sacrifice for them.

But quality of life isn’t created through higher-order pragmatism. It comes from saying no to more and yes to vision.

Preserving quality of life is, by nature, impractical, inefficient, and unproductive. But it’s important to people, and it's what makes this city great.

As a city, we shouldn’t just be able to choose how to navigate a broken system. We should fight for the right to shape a better one and find ways for the public to direct the compromises that actually reflect our vision.

Let’s slow down.
Let’s engage the creativity of constraint.
And let’s start saying no, to say yes to Toronto.