Home | Report 2002 | Motions 2003 | Porto Alegre

Report to FCM’s National Network of City Councillors for Social Inclusion

By Clive Doucet,

City Councillor, Capital Ward, Ottawa.

Feb. 20, 2003

There was an advertisement on Brazilian television that I saw when I was there. Two women are walking gracefully across a dry, wind blown field. They are carrying something on their heads. Three boys are playing in the field. A car appears. It’s metallic sides glow in the heat. It has tinted windows everywhere so you cannot see who is driving or indeed if anyone is inside. For no apparent reason, it stops. The three boys run towards it. The women watch.

The boys clamber all over it, peering in the sun roof, polishing the headlights with the sleeves of their thin shirts, then like young monkeys losing interest with a new toy they climb down. The car moves slowly away, leaving the boys and the women to continue on their way. We never see who is in the car. There is no dialogue. It could be an ad for a particularly expensive car. Then an advertising band appears at the bottom of the screen. It says: ‘Another World is Possible’, the World Social Forum III, Porto Alegre, Jan 23 to 28.

Fifty thousand people came to the World Social Forum II last year. This year every hotel room in the city is booked again. Every tent ground is packed. The Forum has grown so quickly from its first appearance on the world scene two years ago that it has subdivided into sections. There’s the World Social Forum for Educators, for Parliamentarians, for Mayors and City Councillors, all of them connected to the central forum on social and environmental justice. Davros has the money but Porto Alegre has the people.

I came last year as many other city councillors did to find out about Porto Alegre’s participative budget, which has transformed the city and is being adopted throughout Brazil. About ten per cent of every city’s annual budget is actually uncommitted, in my city that ten per cent translates into about 200 million dollars per year. Two hundred million can bring a lot of change if you decide to spend it on people instead roads. The effect in Porto Alegre has certainly been galvanizing. The streets and parks are attractive, safe and clean. The transit system is fast, efficient and cheap combining light rail, busways and mini buses, all of them air conditioned and comfortable. There is an air of confidence and progress about the city.

Is another world possible? To be perfectly blunt, the signs at home are not good. The greatest effect of 9/ll has been to send North America back to the fifties. It is as if the Cold War has started all over again but with different enemies. When making plans to come down here, the travel agent advised me to avoid touching down in the United States. "It just isn’t worth the aggravation" was her telling comment. America and Canada, to a lesser extent, are turning in on themselves. Again there are city and federal politicians from all over the planet here, but very few from North America.

The drama of 9/11 also disguises structural income shifts that weren’t present in the fifties. Unlike the fifties, the median income has stopped growing. The rising economic tide which lifted all boats back in the 50s and 60s, now lifts only the yachts. The Vanier Institute in Canada, the U.S. Census Bureau all tell the same story, most people are taking home less money. North America is heading towards the place Brazil wants to escape. By 1995, the top 1 per cent of American households owned almost 39 per cent of the total household wealth. If you exclude home ownership, it was 47 per cent. The top fifth owned 93 per cent.

This crashing of the median and modal incomes combined with the disappearance of corporate taxation in the wake of the global trade deals has led us directly to an impoverishment of all the great public services, health, education, transit, libraries, day care, parks, air and water standards, on which so much quality of life depends. It’s a vicious circle. Declining quality of life makes people insecure and insecurity feeds the status quo. When people feel threatened, they are not willing to risk change.

I left Ottawa fighting once more with the provincial government. This time it was over their plans to expand Ottawa’s Queensway. The planners were treating this road as if it was the 401 between Napanee and Kingston. It isn’t. It’s a city road that bisects almost every Ottawa neighbourhood and in the center, it is only about a kilometer from Parliament Hill. In the plans, the consultants don’t even have a bus lane set aside. There is no balance in the provincial funding or the plans.

The keys to a different kind of world are sustainability and inclusivity. Creating bigger traffic sewers for cities and at the same time refusing to invest in public transit is neither sustainable nor inclusive, but that’s the kind of mind set, city politicians deal with every day with other orders of government. The federal government not only doesn’t contribute to public transit, it taxes through the GST every rider. It is a government mind set which is costing the province a billion dollars a year in road construction, won’t work and is compromising the quality of life in every Ontario city. It’s back to the 50s but without the money.

Yes, another world is possible. We can build our cities and our nations differently, but people have to be willing to change to make it happen, and right now there’s very little evidence that the will is there among those that govern in North America. It’s back to the 50s for governments but without the money and quality of life that was available then.

Porto Alegre has become a beacon for all those who believe there is another solution besides going backwards to the government polices and public attitudes of the fifties. It’s an improbable capital for all kinds of reasons. It’s too far south, thirteen hours flying time from Ottawa, 15 hours from Europe. It’s in a country which is not renowned for either social or environmental justice. It has one of the ugliest divisions of wealth anywhere on the planet. The top five percent of the population controls about 90 per cent of the wealth. It’s slash and burn peasant agriculture has destroyed large parts of the Amazonian river valley.

Yet, there has emerged in the extreme south of the country a city and a civic culture which is effervescent and transformative. The difference between Porto Alegre and North American cities that I have visited is more than climate. You feel it from the first moment that you step off the plane. It’s in the banners, which hang boldly from the airport rafters, ‘Porto Alegre embraces the world.’ It’s in the sense of openness and confidence, which you discover in the public parks and on the streets and in the cafes.

People walk everywhere. Even the airport is easily accessible by foot. The light rail line drops people off from the downtown and broad comfortable sidewalks sweep people right to the front door of the terminal. The city of Porto Alegre has changed itself through its participative budget process by changing how it invests in itself. The new President of Brazil, ‘Luis Inacio ‘Lula’ da Silva. He is a former metal worker who has run for President four times before winning. His success, finally, came out of the civil society movement that the unions were part of but did not control, and has spread from Porto Alegre to over 200 Brazilian municipalities including the largest, Sao Paulo.

I came home from the World Forum for Local Authorities last year exhilarated by the possibilities of the Porto Alegran model and did my best to advance the idea of a participative budget in Canadian cities. A year later finds me in a different, more cautious frame of mind. It is not that I think any less of the participative budget-civic engagement process of Porto Alegre, it comes more from a realization of the impermeability of North America to new governance ideas.

The threat of a war with Iraq has pushed North America even further back into itself than it was after the attacks on the World Trade Centre. It is a curious thing that we are seeing, the richest, most powerful nation that has ever existed on the planet, spending more than 440 billion on military and armaments ‘per year’, hunkered down behind psychological, social and military walls that grow higher with each passing day.

I see it every day in the triple lines of defence, concrete street barriers, steel sidewalk bollards, steel fencing, bunkering the American Embassy in Ottawa. It looks like something out of Star Wars and remains a constant reminder that these folks are frightened. I saw it in the lack of participation and coverage of the World Social Forum. Any casual reflection about the North American participation should astonish the reader. There were delegations from the democratic nations of western Europe and South America. There was one city councillor from North America.

It was exciting just watching the French, Germans, the Spanish, Italians, Portuguese, Brazilians, Argentines and so on hanging out, talking dreaming of building better cities and a better world. I spoke and was welcomed warmly everywhere but I was the lone North American represenative. It would have made a great difference if we had had a Canadian delegation that could have participated, learned and come back to their own cities invigorated with new ideas and new friendships.

Did we accomplish anything? You bet. A new world organization ‘United Cities and Local Authorities’ will have its inaugural meeting in Paris this year, but it had its birth in Porto Alegre. It will give cities for the first time a world voice for cities. A voice that will begin by demanding at Davos that cities be consulted before any international trade organizations are signed. It’s an organization, which I think will replace the Mayors and City Councillors section of the World Social Forum because it will have a secretariat and institutional framework to buttress it. I do not, for example, as much as I would like to revisit Porto Alegre see the point of my attending the conference again next year. Nor would I would recommend that others do. I suggest if you can find the time and the travel money, it would be better spent attending the founding meeting of the United Cities and Local Authorities Conference.

This is not bad news. The World Social Forum is too large too multi-facetted to remain under one roof in Porto Alegre. Third World debt, the African pandemic, the struggle for local and global democracy, these battles are enormous and cannot be contained in one city at one conference, even one the size of the World Social Forum. They will continue in other places with new organizations spawned by the conversations in Porto Alegre.

But it is a conversation that North American politicians and the North American public are largely ignorant of, the consequences of that isolation are most clear expressed in the rumours of war. As the new President of Brazil said at both Davos and Porto Alegre, the only war we should be engaged with is against poverty and social exclusion. It is a message which politicians in the North aren’t hearing.

My apologies for taking so long to get back to you with a report of my trip but one of the things that I am convinced that we need to put on the front burner at this year’s FCM conference in Winnipeg is ‘capacity building’ for city councillors here in Canada. When I look at the kind of resources that city councillors in Brazilian and European cities have compared to Canadian, it strikes me that it is we who are living in the underdeveloped world. They have the resources to do more and think more than the latest crisis over community center and public transit funding. And we could serve our constituents better if we did.

All the best,

Clive Doucet