Speech by Councillor Doucet at the World Forum, January 21, 2003
Mesdames et messieurs, ladies and gentlemen, Chers collègues, Dear colleagues.
It is an honour to be invited to speak at Porto Alegre at the Mayors and City Councillors World Forum for Inclusive Cities. I thank you very much for the invitation.
The title of my presentation is "Creating Inclusive Cities and the Struggle for Local and Global Democracy." I will speak from the Canadian experience with a special focus on my own city, Ottawa.
I represent a ward which you may have seen from time to time on television. It is home to the longest skating rink in the world - The Rideau Canal in the wintertime - which is also lined by tulip beds that bloom wondrously each spring. My Ward is a downtown ward, which means it has some very rich areas and some immigrant and low-income areas.
Canadian city councils that wish to create more inclusive cities by investing in more in public transit, more in day care, more in protecting greenspace, and more in common services like libraries, parks and swimming pools, face two great barriers. Each one is equally powerful, each one equally destructive to building more humane and welcoming cities.
Both concern the lack of democracy at the City level. Legally, there is no such thing as a city in Canada. It is an administrative unit of the State with locally elected councils, similar to local school boards, which administers schools. Both the school board and the city council can have their taxing powers and responsibilities changed as the State wishes, or be disbanded completely and replaced with a state-appointed supervisor.
This is what happens in Canada. Let me give you some examples. The State Government has disbanded the locally elected school boards of the three largest cities in the province, Ottawa, Toronto and Hamilton because these local authorities refused to close schools and reduce services to the disabled as the State requested. A State supervisor was appointed to replace the local authorities and impose the State cuts.
Fifty per cent of the taxes for local schools are raised from local property taxes so you would think that it would be a democratic necessity to have some co-operation between the State and the local school boards. The State’s response is that there is no such thing as a local tax. Property taxes are a state tax, which have been delegated to the city and school boards to collect. If the State does not like how school or city taxes are being administered, it can simply reassume the powers of administration and collection or force the City to collect the property taxes as it wishes.
This is how we have lost local control of the quality of education in all our city schools. Our constituents want a return to the higher quality of public schools that they had when the local authority controlled the quality of education but school boards are not allowed to collect the taxes necessary to achieve this. There are now seven private schools in my ward whereas five years ago there were three. In other words, privatization is being forced upon us.
Let’s look at protecting water quality. Last year seven people died in the town of Walkerton and hundreds suffered kidney damage, in the State of Ontario, the same State that I live in, from polluted town water. The polluted water was the result of animal feed lots at the edge of the town.
Canadian city and town councils can do nothing to prevent these industrial farms from being set up in or near their cities. Right now in Ottawa, we have been fighting the State over the approval of an industrial hog farm, which is the equivalent of a town of 20,000 people without a sewage system. Sooner or later the State will win because they can create the legislation which will over-ride local authorities. If a city or town wishes to protect its water supplies from corporations who wish to take water from the rivers, the provincial authorities can and does over-ride limits by city and town councils.
Let’s look at public transit. Every Canadian city is desperate for more public transit. Every Canadian city is suffering from declining air quality and over burdened roads. The State will not put money into public transit, nor can cities raise enough taxes to provide an adequate service. But the State will put hundreds of millions of dollars in highways around the edges of cities. The result of all this state funding of roads is an expensive, complex suburban road system and a scattered residential development pattern, which makes good public transit impossible to deliver.
Canada is a rich country with rich cities but the cities are starving. They’re starving because they can’t get a fair share of the taxes that they generate. Federal tax revenues climbed by 38 per cent between 1995 and 2001. State Revenues climbed by 30 per cent between 1995 and 2001. Municipal revenues increased by only 14 per cent which, given physical growth of the city and inflation is actually a per capita decrease. The City of Ottawa receives about seven cents of every new tax dollar generated in our city. The rest all flows to the State and Federal governments.
A person who owns a 150,000-dollar home in my city will pay 20,000 dollars in taxes to the federal and state government and $2,000 to the city.
The bigger the Canadian city is, the worse the situation is. Toronto, Canada’s largest city has declined in ten years from one of the planet’s Poster cities to one that Canadians prefer not to visit. It’s dirty. The air quality is poor and Asthma is now, the no. 1 reason we admit children to hospitals in my city. Toronto has the most congested highways in North America. Toronto’s streets have homeless people wandering on them and the city is spending $90 million a year on temporary shelters.
This has all happened because the city governments and local school boards have no legislative powers to resist the predatory behaviour of state and federal governments who have developed budget surpluses. The Canadian federal government had an $8 billion dollar surplus last year. The state government has given tax reductions based on off-loading services like housing, ambulances and public health onto cities without giving them the means to pay for them. But City governments have no access to the great ‘afford to pay’ taxes, the income taxes, the GST, the gas and fuel taxes and the land transfer taxes.
But we need more than new leaders. We need democratic reforms, which give cities legislative and taxing powers appropriate to their responsibilities. Last year at this forum Marie Lienemann, the French Minister of Housing concluded her ringing speech with the words "we are not specks of dust in the universe, we are citizens". But we can’t be effective citizens if the city politicians that citizens elect do not have the legislative powers necessary to carry out the responsibilities conferred on them. That’s the first obstacle to effective local democracy, we need legislative authority appropriate to our responsibilities.
The second is, Canadian cities must get a direct share, not a grant share, of the national ability to pay taxes, the Income taxes, the GST, the Sales, Licensing. We must liberate cities from the oppression of a tax system, which the other orders of government manipulate to suit their own electoral needs.
Thirdly, we need to remove corporate funding from all elections, local, state and federal. As long as politicians are obliged to line up for corporate funding to run for elected office the democratic agenda will continue to be bought, no matter who is elected or at what level.
In our country, the national health system is under great stress. One of the principal drivers of those increasing health costs are related to twenty years of patent protection which the national government accorded the pharmaceutical industry. If you don’t think that that has anything to do with contribution to federal election campaigns, then I’ve got a city bridge to sell you.
At the city level, the development industry pays for up to 80% of some city politicians campaigns, I’ve never seen the development industry not get the sewer lines or roads or urban zoning that it requested from council. The last time developers came to our city council, the majority of city council voted against our own staff’s report and accorded the development industry 220 million dollars in reduced development fees- which means 220 million dollars less for day care, community centers, public transit. The only difference between the corporate funding of federal, state and city elections is the number of zeros.
Finally: All international trade and finance meetings should be open to the public and international trade agreements created by these comfortable international clubs need to be subject to a free vote of national parliaments and not as appendices of parliamentary carriage bills which cannot be debated except in a yes or no vote.
I have been in many different public debates, should the city be bilingual? Should we ban smoking in public places? Should taxes be increased? These are not easy things to discuss. During these debates, citizens freely walked into the Committee rooms and Council Chambers of City Hall to make their opinions known, often with great emotion. There needs to be this opportunity for public debate in the process leading up to the signing of international trade agreements.
Power is a seductive commodity and rarely relinquished willingly. The struggle for a local and global democracy is all about changing the power structure. It will require more than a local effort It requires international consensus and that means we get together and say with a common voice from Brazil to Canada, from Canada to Europe, from Europe to Africa that:
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Cities obtain legislation powers that reflect their responsibilities
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Cities obtain a fair share of the afford to pay taxes
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Corporate funding be removed from election campaigns
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That international trade agreements be subject to free votes in national parliaments and consultation with other levels of government.
And it is my hope that the final declaration coming from Porto Alegre will include these four points.
Thank you