I just want to take a second to give a shout-out to two great, young candidates from youth-led organizations running for city council in the upcoming municipal elections on November 13th:

Amarjeet Chhabra, Candidate in Ward 43 Scarborough East

Keith Sweeney, Candidate in Ward 12 York South-Weston

Both would be amazing city councillors. Check them out and, if you can, support them financially by making a donation or by volunteering your time for this final stretch!

For more info about who's running and how to get informed, check out www.whorunsthistown.to

So tonight was the "All Youth Mayoral Debate" at Hart House (University of Toronto). The event started an hour late because of the antics of Kevin Clarke. Clarke, a candidate for mayor, seized the stage and demanded to be allowed to participate in the event. In between his unintelligible rants, Clarke poured himself glasses of water while people asked him to leave the stage. Some people cheered but it was pretty clear that Clarke was somewhat unstable. Hart House policy is that an event be cancelled before someone be forcibly removed, so a recess was called where everyone left and eventually Clarke left. If not for the media, he probably would have left a lot earlier...

Organizers initially sought a compromise where all the candidates for mayor in attendance would be allowed to participate, but safety concerns over Clarke's history of behaviour prevented this from happening. Sonic Dave, Shaun Bruce, and Mitch Gold, among other mayoral candidates, were at the event, as well as a group of candidates running for city council.

In terms of the actual debate, I was really disappointed. The debate was not a debate, it was a take turns answering pre-determined questions and then take some from the audience style affair. With the exception of the first question, which was about black youth and addressing the root causes of violence, candidates were asked about particularly middle class issues like tuition (3 times!!!) and student housing. This was obviously a result of the make-up of the crowd.

If there was more time, I would like to organize an afternoon event at the St. Lawrence Forum and invite students from high schools to come down, giving them control over the format and who was invited to participate.

The level of discourse was pretty low and I don't really think anyone could have taken much home from this event. Miller got the most applause and LeDrew was heckled the most. Here are some highlights from my notes:

- Miller said he announced today that he supports landed immigrants being able to vote, but remained silent on lowering the voting age, which Pitfield said she supported at least twice

- Pitfield mentioned her affordable housing plan where people living in public housing making $40,000 or more would be able to buy homes, which was met by silence...She also said she wanted to take money from that is spent on homelessness and use it for rent supplements

- LeDrew made an interesting point about the sole-sourcing TTC cars debacle: if council wanted them to be made in Canada, they should have just included that in their request for proposal, instead of not doing one...

- Miller talked about the so-called U-Pass for university students several times, which is not well-liked because the last time it was proposed it was mandatory for all full-time students at $65 per month...something that could never pass a referendum at UofT

- LeDrew made a good pitch about young people getting involved in politics and voting, probably the best response to the question about involving youth. In his response, Miller twice repeated that there were two youth on his Community Safety Panel, which isn't actually true...it was hard to resist from heckling

- Miller did mention the Toronto Youth Cabinet and said it was doing good work, but he basically used it as a crutch for saying how he was involving young people at city hall...Pitfield also said she thought TYC did good work, but she felt there were too many young adults as opposed to youth (difference?) and wanted to speak to some teenagers...for the record, I fully support the creation of the Toronto Children's Cabinet

I'm really curious how the media will report this event. Will it just be about Kevin Clarke? I saw CityTV tonight and they said how it focused on tuition. I wanted to throw up.

David Miller, Toronto’s current mayor, is widely expected to be re-elected on November 13th. While it originally looked like he would simply be running on his record as mayor, Miller has now made two new funding commitments, one to make a “safe city safer” and another for a “cleaner and more beautiful city”.

For community safety, he is promising to support Toronto’s 13 priority neighbourhoods by investing $13 million for infrastructure improvements, by creating new employment opportunities for youth, and by eliminating recreation user fees for children and youth.

For civic beautification, he is promising, among other things, to invest $17.6 million to create a fund equal to $100,000 per ward, per year, to create a “Partnerships Office” to support residents and businesses in improving public spaces, and to hire graffiti artists to create community-approved murals.

I definitely have some reservations. First of all, I will add my voice to the chorus of people who feel that this is not enough and that Miller is thinking too small. In terms of infrastructure, the entire $13 million could not build more than one community centre.

Second, while the concept of priority neighbourhoods is problematic because there are way more than 13 vulnerable neighbourhoods in Toronto, at least you know the money is going somewhere where it is needed. The pot of beautification money will be handed out at the local councillor’s discretion, with no guarantee that it will go to where it is needed most. In fact, you can almost guarantee that it won’t because the best organized residents associations and citizens are in the most affluent areas.

Although it does not have the same allure, the beautification money would be better spent if it were given to the Toronto Community Housing Corporation for the maintenance of our public housing units, which have fallen into a terrible state of disrepair.

On that note, I sincerely hope that Miller’s next platform plank will be related to housing. In 1998, the mayors of the largest Canadian cities declared homelessness a national disaster, and since then we have done nowhere near enough to stop it.

Jane Pitfield, the main challenger for Miller’s job, has been quick to point out the absurdity of a beautification initiative that overlooks the most disgraceful problem with Toronto’s streets: people are forced to live on them because they do not have homes.

Looks like I have something else to bring up at Monday's debate.

David Miller: Who is this guy?
Translated into French by: Ryan Hayes
David Miller, Toronto’s current mayor, is widely expected to be re-elected on November 13th. While it originally looked like he would simply be running on his record as mayor, Miller has now made two new funding commitments, one to make a “safe city safer” and another for a “cleaner and more beautiful city”.

With Toronto's municipal elections coming up on November 13th, the Toronto Youth Cabinet will be hosting an "all-youth" debate with the main candidates on Monday, October 23rd, 6:30pm-8:00pm, at Hart House. Here are some of the questions that I want answers to:

Preamble: We recently met with a group of youth to talk about police harassment. In this particular community, a lot of the young people had experienced harassment first-hand. One suggestion from the group was to create a community-based complaints system to receive, document, and follow-up on complaints about police behaviour.

Question #1: Would you support this initiative? What else will you do to address police harassment experienced by youth and prevent its future occurrence?

Preamble: Young people and new immigrants are often excluded from the political process. In order to address the marginalization of youth and recent immigrants, a new report from the Social Planning Council of Toronto calls for the voting age to be lowered to 16 and for all residents to be able to vote regardless of their citizenship status.

Question #2: Do you support this extension of voting rights? Will you commit to seeking the support of city councillors in asking the provincial government to extend these rights in your first year in office?

Preamble: In early 2007, Toronto City Council will be voting on whether or not it wants to implement a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy so that all residents of Toronto can access municipal services without fear. Such a policy would also prevent municipal resources such as police from being used to do the job of federal enforcement officers.

Question #3: Will you vote in favour of implementing a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy?

Preamble: During the past few decades, many democratic innovations have been realized around the world, yet Toronto appears to be lagging behind. Our voter turnout remains low at 38% and is even lower for youth. The people who are most affected by the issues are too often not involved in the decisions that affect their fate.

Question #4: What is your action plan for increasing civic engagement in Toronto? What specifically will you do to engage young people? How have you involved youth in leadership roles in your campaign?

Preamble: Since 2001, the Toronto Community Housing Corporation has used a participatory budgeting process to involve tenants in budget decision-making. Currently, 13% ($9 million) of the TCHC's capital budget is determined in this process.

Question #5: Do you support making the city budget process more participatory by allowing residents to set priorities and to determine where a set amount of funds should be allocated?

Image source: www.whorunsthistown.to

I am going to put this Pan-Can stuff on hold for a couple days until I get some other people's opinions. Still waiting to hear back from TIG, TYC people, and from other youth cabinets/councils...

If anyone out there is reading this, I would love to hear your thoughts.

During the grant application process, we were asked, "How are you going to ensure marginalized young people are involved (i.e. those most affected by the issues)?"

This is a crucial question for any organization, particularly one claiming to represent an entire area. For example, while the Toronto Youth Cabinet aspires to be representative of all youth in Toronto, this is not the reality. We are trying to address this by creating more economic opportunities for people who cannot afford to volunteer their time, forming strong relationships with other youth-led organizations in Toronto, and doing outreach and activities in specific communities.

For a national initiative, this question is equally important. I can’t speak to the lived experience of conference participants, but I do know that you can’t legitimately call an initiative “Pan-Canadian” if Francophone and Aboriginal groups are not involved in a meaningful way. Had we started organizing earlier, we could have fundraised travel subsidies to help translate interest from marginalized groups into attendance.

In addition, the need for inclusion was a key message in Taking It Global’s recent Report on National Youth Councils:

A NYC must be the result of a cooperative effort and interest of existing, active youth groups and organizations who are involved from the outset. In a country like Canada, creating equal opportunity for groups from the whole geographical expanse to be involved in this "founding" process will be a particular challenge.

Based on the new Creating Local Connections project, it looks to me like they are positioning themselves to support initiatives that will help a Canadian National Youth Council take form organically. And with staff hired specifically to work with Francophone and Aboriginal youth, there is clearly a focus on inclusion.

Now, given that we youth cabinets/councils often fail to engage marginalized youth, and given that many areas do not have youth cabinets/councils, how inclusive would it be for us to attempt to form a national network without anyone else?

Should we be more inclusive in our planning of next year's conference, particularly in terms of involving marginalized youth? Or, should we view our organizing as only one part of a larger puzzle, and not include non-youth cabinet youth? These are the questions I am wrestling with.

P.S. I really wish youth across Canada had been in a position to respond to the federal government's recent $1 billion in budget cuts to programs supporting equity seeking groups. The federal youth employment program was cut in half, which means thousands of summer jobs disappeared!

This summer the Toronto Youth Cabinet (which I'm in) held a conference in Toronto with about 50 youth from seven Canadian youth cabinets/councils: Toronto, London, Mississauga, Vancouver, Edmonton, Saint John, and Newfoundland and Labrador. It was relatively small compared to many conferences, but it was a pretty big effort on our part to organize this.

The conference culminated in the creation of a Youth Charter mural that we brought to the World Youth Forum and World Urban Forum in Vancouver. It all went by way too fast - more time was needed for having deeper discussions, but there is a wiki site with some of the conference notes.

We remained in contact by email and started to brainstorm how we could sustain and strengthen a Pan-Canadian Network of Youth Cabinets. In Toronto we submitted a grant proposal for a network coordinator to the Laidlaw Foundation, which was ultimately turned down.

Since then we have been trying get Toronto Youth Cabinet a student from Ryerson University for this purpose. It's been slow but surprisingly it's still a possibility because half the students in the fourth year social work class don't have placements yet!

Along the way, I have really been forced to re-evaluate the concept of a Pan-Canadian Youth Cabinet/Council Network, especially after corresponding with Kehinde from Laidlaw and finding Taking It Global's Report on National Youth Councils and the Creating Local Connections project.

But more on this next time. This already feels like it's way too long for a post.