For the third year in a row, Toronto ranked 15th in the world in the Mercer Quality of Living Survey.
The David Suzuki Foundation named the city the North American leader in combating climate change.
And this spring we made Forbes’ Top-10 list of most economically powerful cities.
Median hourly wages have grown by more than 3 per cent this year to almost $19 in the city and to $19.44 in the surrounding region.
Last year, for the first time in history, more than half of Toronto public high school graduates applied for post-secondary education.
More of us are buying homes, taking public transit to work and attending city-funded cultural events.
But there is peril amid the promise, warns Vital Signs 2008, the Toronto Community Foundation’s annual checkup on the city’s economic and social health.
More than one-quarter of all Toronto families with children live in poverty – a number that continues to mount as the region grows.
Our population is aging as our birth rate falls, highlighting the looming shortage of workers to support retiring baby boomers.
Meanwhile, educated newcomers are having more trouble breaking into good jobs than immigrants of the past.
“The city averages out wonderfully against the rest of the world,” says Toronto Community Foundation president Rahul Bhardwaj. “But not enough people are living in that highly ranked city.
“There has been unprecedented economic growth in Toronto, but it’s been very much a lost decade for immigrants and in particular, recent immigrants,” he adds.
As 2006 Census data shows, new immigrants are hired half as often as Canadian-born residents and when they do find work, they earn half as much, Bhardwaj notes.
The So family of Mississauga is among those feeling the pinch.
Charles So was a successful businessman with a college diploma and 16 years of senior management experience in the Hong Kong tourist industry and his wife, Envy, was a bank branch manager, when they immigrated to Toronto with their three young daughters in 1995.
But neither has been able to maximize their education or experience in Canada.
So considers himself luckier than most because he was able to use connections in Hong Kong to help find his first job here as a catering sales manager for a hotel. Friends also helped him get work in an insurance company and then a travel agency.
But the pay for these relatively junior positions – about $30,000 a year – was not enough to raise a growing family.
With the help of another family friend, So traded his white-collar job for work in a factory making steel strapping where he earned $42,000 a year and up to $80,000 with overtime. The union job also included generous health benefits and a pension. Last year, with his two eldest daughters in university, the company closed, throwing So and about 100 others out of work.
The Steelworkers’ union helped So retrain as a supply chain and logistics manager last winter. Last spring So paid for a course in computer programming to improve his job prospects. But after sending out 140 resumés, he was unable to find work in his new field.
Last month So turned to friends again who helped him get a job in a small manufacturing company – but for significantly less pay than he was earning before.
“After 13 years, I’m almost back to square zero. I’m starting all over again,” says So, who acknowledges he’s lucky because at least he came to Canada with enough money to buy a home.
“We didn’t come here as refugees,” he says. “We came here to help build this country. But we are not given a chance to contribute. Employers have to change. (Government re-training programs) have to put in more effort to help people get jobs in their areas of education.”
In the St. Clair W. Ave. offices of Skills for Change, executive director Jane Cullingworth sees thousands of cases like So every year.
The agency, which helps newcomers upgrade their qualifications and find work in their areas of expertise, says Canada must do a better job of helping immigrants put their training to good use.
In cases where professionals lack communications skills or Canadian experience, classes in the workplace would allow them to earn a living at the same time, she says.
But it’s difficult in an economy where full-time work is increasingly being replaced by part-time, temporary employment.
“This is an issue affecting all Canadians, but particularly new immigrants,” Cullingworth says.
The loss of stable, well-paying jobs and the resulting income disparity between wealthy and low-income neighbourhoods threatens the city’s social cohesion and enviable quality of life, says University of Toronto social work professor David Hulchanski.
Hulchanski’s groundbreaking work on trends in household income in the GTA since 1970 shows Toronto is becoming three cities in one. Neighbourhoods clustered along the city’s two subway lines have seen dramatic increases in household income while household incomes in the largely ethnic northeast and northwest corners of the city have plummeted. What’s left is a shrinking number of communities in between where incomes remain within 20 per cent above and below-average.
“We used to be a city of middle-income neighbourhoods,” says Hulchanski, who is also associate director of research at U of T’s Cities Centre. “What we’re seeing is a growing income gap and polarization of city neighbourhoods.”
The good news, he says, is that this trend has occurred over a relatively short 15-year period and is largely due to public policy decisions that can be revised or reversed. “If over the next 15 years every (federal and provincial) budget chipped away at this problem … we’d make progress and we’d be able to measure it and see it,” he says.
Federal and provincial affordable housing programs, child care to support working families and better labour regulations to protect low-wage and temporary workers, would go a long way to closing the income gap, he says.
So would better income security for seniors, children and those between jobs, he adds.
City hall should do its part to help the impoverished suburbs by revitalizing crumbling public housing complexes, expanding public transit, and improving recreation and social programs in low-income neighbourhoods.
But without new funds, the city’s hands are tied. Over the last five years, municipal spending in Toronto has jumped by 6.7 per cent while revenues have grown by only 5.6 per cent.
New property taxes imposed last year and provincial uploading of $188 million in social services and transit are keeping the city afloat this year. But as long as Toronto and other Canadian cities are forced to rely largely on property taxes which do not grow with the economy, the city will continue to teeter on the brink of financial crisis, says Anne Golden, president of the Conference Board of Canada.
Across the country, this funding crisis means cities are facing some $122 billion in costs for desperately needed repairs to roads, bridges, sewers and sidewalks. Lack of investment in public transit costs the GTA about $2 billion annually in lost economic activity due to traffic congestion, Golden notes.
“Toronto, like big cities around the world, creates wealth for the country. But in Canada, cities don’t reap the benefits of that wealth creation because they don’t have access to growth taxes like the sales or income tax,” she says.
In a recent paper on municipal finance, the conference board recommends provinces allow cities to levy up to 1 percentage point of provincial sales taxes generated within their borders. The board also recommends federal and provincial governments upload financial responsibility for services they used to fund such as airports and harbours and social programs such as affordable housing and welfare.
“In a country like Canada, wealth creation depends on innovation. And innovation happens in cities,” Golden says. “It’s why we need to give cities like Toronto the financial tools they need to maintain their quality of life.”
Golden credits the federal government for making the gas tax a permanent source of funding for urban transit and the Ontario government for beginning to resume financial responsibility for social programs downloaded in the 1990s.
“I think we’re starting to wake up to the importance of cities,” she says. “You have `urbanists’ pointing to the role of cities as places were most of us now live; economists pointing to cities’ role in global competitiveness and culture; and governments taking some small steps in the right direction. So I’m hopeful.”
A City Divided
Income Gap 66 – Per cent of neighbourhoods considered middle income in 1970, compared to 32 per cent in 2000.
Safety 7,277 – Crimes per 100,000 people committed last year, down from 8,787 in 1998
Education 70 – Per cent of students in the Toronto District School Board whose parents were both born outside of Canada.
Housing 75 – Per cent of families spending more than the accepted financial threshold for housing in 2006, compared to 44 per cent in 1981.
Immigration $46,203 – Median family income for recent immigrants in 2005, half the amount of a Canadian-born family.
Transportation 314,000 – Vehicles that come into the city during morning rush hour, 75 per cent more than 20 years ago. 58.2 – Per cent of Torontonians reported a sense of community belonging, the lowest level of a Canadian city outside Quebec.
Environment 188.5 – Kilograms of garbage dumped per capita in 2007, 28 per cent less than in 2003
Employment $18.91 – Median hourly wage in Toronto in July; $19.44 in the surrounding region.
Canadian workplaces are diverse, reflecting our diverse population.
This is a good thing! Diverse organizations are more innovative and productive – but to be productive, workplaces also need to be inclusive. Diverse teams need environments where everyone feels that they belong and that they can contribute.
How exactly do you create an inclusive workplace? The TRIEC Inclusive Workplace Competencies can answer this question. They provide a framework to help you and your colleagues build organization that works for everyone.
The competencies are based on research and consultations with a range of experts. But what do we mean by competencies, and why should your organization use them?
Competencies describe the knowledge, skills, and behavior that you need to perform effectively at work. Nowadays, being great at your job is about more than just getting through a list of tasks – it’s about being able to demonstrate key behaviors in different situations. Creating an inclusive organization is everyone’s job and goes way beyond what an individual employee does. So competencies are also about how teams work together and the organization’s culture.
There are 15 competencies, divided into three areas: myself, my team and my organization. You can add them to your existing competencies and customize and adapt them to meet the needs of your workplace. For example, if innovation is a priority for your organization, you can set the competency “collaborate in diverse teams to foster productive outcomes” at a high level for all of its employees.
One of the great things about these competencies is that you can use them in many different ways. You can use them to write job descriptions, in recruitment, to design training, to review organizational policies and processes, and much more. To find out more about how the competencies work and try them out for yourself, visit triec.ca/competencies.
