Also, doesn’t Cory have a real thing against the City of London (which is, and always has been, one square mile in size), mainly because the banks and corporations that reside there have outsize political infence on the geographic region they dominate? Is it city-centre for central citizens or not?
I am sympathetic to the point that Cory was unfair to Toronto’s suburbs in saying they aren’t real Torontonians. But I don’t think you can compare citizens who are geographically clustered by voting intention with rich corporations having influence on local government.
1 Like
The City of London has a weird voting system where employers/corporations actually get to vote (with a diluted number of votes being apportioned according to the number of employees), on the somewhat understandable principle that few of the people who actually work in the city (some 300,000) actually live there (some 7,000), and that otherwise their interest in the city would not be counted. I suspect the core principle is correct, though obviously corporations are unlikely to express the same range of positions as their employees, but I think no matter how you look at it the fundamental problem is that the geographic are of the City is so small that it’s difficult to have elections that fully represent the community as a whole and all relevant stakeholders.
Thanks for enlightening me. Knowing that, I could revise my above comment to point out that it was entirely consistent to be against the amalgamation of Toronto and the power of corporations in London - both are examples of thinking that local people should determine local government. It sounds like in London city centre rule is specifically designed not to be for citizens of the city centre.
What makes someone a citizen of an area? Simply sleeping there? Having a mailing address there? Do those who work there have any interest in the governance of the area? Do commuters have any interest in the infrastructure they use? Do those who have invested in an area, under the assumption of stability, have any interest in the area? If the 7,000 residents of this tiny city wanted to totally ban all vehicles and replace all roads with grassy parks, would this be fundamentally democratic?
At any rate, I would strongly suspect that the actual residents of the City have interests strongly aligned with the corporations that do business there. If removing employer voting resulted in the same political outcomes, would this be the ideal outcome? Or would complaints about a small, and generally unrepresentative government still be valid?
Well, my main point was that the two views - Toronto amalgamation is unfair to Toronto, corporate voting is unfair to Londoners - are consistent.
As to whether that’s a fair or correct view, I’m not really sure. Giving corporations votes on the theory that they will use them to represent their employees seems completely ridiculous to me, though since I only just heard about this system in London from you today I’m not an expert on it’s actual implementation Even if it is terrible that isn’t the only possible implementation of the idea that people who work in the city should have some say, not just people who live in the city.
Simply put, for now, yes having an address in a city is exactly what determines whether you get to vote in that city’s elections around here. I’m not sure how to make that more fair.
As to your question about getting rid of the streets… I’m not sure if that was meant to be rhetorical, but I think it is a very good question. If we have decided that roads are a matter for local government, then how is it not democratic if the local government decides to do something with it’s roads? Sure, it affects other people (part of why we can expect that they wouldn’t, in fact, do this), but if we are concerned about local government using their authority to do harmful things then we should address that in law and put in mechanisms to deal with it.
If Canada decided to get rid of all roads that would affect a lot of people in the US. A good government wouldn’t implement that policy without consulting people who would be affected, including US federal and state governments. But does that mean that people in the US should get to vote in Canada? There is no voting system in the world that can change the fact that we fundamentally live our lives hoping that other people to not screw us over.
It wasn’t a rhetorical question. And there are some fundamental differences between the City/commuters and Canada/US examples. 300,000 people work in the City every day, but only 7,000 live there: a ratio of 42:1. Furthermore, individuals who live in the city will only be mildly inconvenienced (the biggest obstacles coming when they decide to move), while businesses will be hugely affected. This is very different than the Canada/US example, both in terms of inconvenience to those voting as well as how many non-voters they’re making decisions for.
Well, it’s very different in that 421 is a lot higher ratio than 0.0001. But that’s is accepting that people who don’t live somewhere should get to vote and then haggling over how much their vote should count when compared to that of the people who do live there. What if the downtown of Toronto separated from Canada and became its own city-state? Why would that change the importance of the views of the people from the suburbs in their affairs?
The thing is, the example could just as easily go the other way. What if the people who didn’t actually live in the city proper had enough of a vote to form a majority and they voted to stop paying for police because it was cheaper for them to pay the private security at their offices rather than pay taxes for police? That hardly seems “fundamentally democratic” either.
But if the people who work - but don’t live - there don’t have a majority that means the people who live there do so they can just vote for the no streets plan anyway.
A democracy composed of two groups - each of which is trying to screw the other - is a broken society and, as I said above, no voting system can remedy that. The fact is that in either of these examples it is not to the benefit of people to vote for things that harm their neighbours. It hurts people who live downtown to vote in a government that screws the suburbs and it hurts people who live in the suburbs to vote in a government that screws downtown. It hurts everyone if the downtown government doesn’t consult with the suburban government on transit plans that affect people getting to work.
Given all of that, I’m not sure why it is rational that people downtown get one vote (for their own local government) and people in the suburbs get 2 votes (for their own and for the downtown local government) - or 1.1 votes or whatever it works out to. Of course that isn’t happening in either of the examples at hand. In Toronto everyone gets one vote but people have extreme regional differences and in London (from what you’ve described) everyone gets 1 vote and corporations get some votes too under the guise of giving votes to people.
A list of other things that Ford has done: http://jeromiewilliams.com/2013/11/03/updated-list-113-things-toronto-mayor-rob-ford-has-done-besides-smoking-crack-in-a-video/
Well, everything is always going to come back to the original question of how we define a polity. Who should be able to vote, and how much weight should their vote carry. We could imagine an increasingly sophisticated voting system where votes are weighted in a geographically proportional manner, or where things beyond simply where your mailing address is located is taken into account. Of course, this more or less presupposes there is some sort of broad will to enact this kind of voting system, which is unlikely to be the case.
And as you suggest, problems can potentially exist even beyond national borders. Obviously members of the EMU have given up fiscal independence and are no longer able to exert independent monetary policy. And I can remember the federalists’ position during the 1995 Quebec referendum, where they asserted that Quebec alone couldn’t vote to secede and that only a nation-wide referendum would be binding. Then there were the native groups within Quebec, who essentially asserted that they, too, should have the right to determine if they should secede from an independent Quebec and re-join or remain with Canada.
There are obviously serious issues wrapped up in determining the relevant polity, and I’m not sure that Cory’s picking and choosing of what electoral boundaries are legitimate really reflect any thoughtful position on the issue.
Whether its thoughtful I think the idea that only people in an area vote for the local government in traditional. What’s really at question here is the legitimacy of Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough as part of Toronto. And that is partly historical, a conservative government that won few seats in old Toronto merged the city with the surrounding cities where they won the majority of seats. It felt like a move intended to reduce the political influence of the old city.
Having moved to Toronto post 2000 I never lived in the old city and don’t have strong feelings about it. But I still think the London situations sounds outright bonkers, and the Toronto situation could be seen as a form of gerrymandering. I can’t really blame anyone for being mad about either, and I think being mad about both could show a consistent underlying view of who should have a voice in local government.
Well, the City of London’s employer voting is extremely traditional, though most other British jurisdictions that employed it abolished it 50 years ago. And let’s imagine that employer voting was abolished there, too. Would it still make sense that 7,000 people had effective voting control over the financial capital of Europe?
I’m from Calgary. The city of Calgary has expanded its city boundaries as the city has grown, essentially annexing new territory every 20 or 30 years. This has obviously led to incremental dilution in the value of central votes as new voters on the outskirts are added. Places like Bowness used to be separate, independent communities but no longer are. Does this raise questions about the legitimacy of Calgary’s boundaries?
I don’t know, does it? The town I grew up in grew and absorbed other nearby towns as they gradually grew together. It seemed pretty natural. Toronto got put together by the heavy hand of the province and it feels much more forced. As I say, this Toronto is the only one I’ve known and I don’t have strong feelings for the old city boundaries. I can totally understand why some people do.
I mean, the argument essentially seems to be that if you expand the polity gradually, then it’s legitimate; but if you have long periods of ossification followed by wholesale expansion, then it’s illegitimate. At least in the latter model the city-core voters actually did exert some power for some time, though I have no doubt it feels much more unfair when that power is taken away (as opposed to the former situation, where the core voters never had any power).
I don’t think I’m arguing for any general rule. Toronto has a particular history where amalgamation felt very forced and a reasonable person may suspect that it was politically motivated - that the entire point of amalgamation was to make the local government more right-wing in order to support the agenda of the at-the-time provincial government.
It doesn’t really make sense to compare Toronto to one of those cities that gradually grows and gobbles up small towns over time. Toronto is more like one of the small towns that got gobbled up. As Rob Ford’s election showed, Toronto isn’t Old Toronto, it’s Etobicoke-NorthYork-Scarborough (each of which could also feel that they were unfairly disenfranchised).
This topic was automatically closed after 8 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
