Urban Life: Govern city space: Scholar tries to unravel maze of metro connections, governance

Professor of political theory, Jonathan Chaplin, in a major theory-piece in Comment, seeks to give readers a glimpse of what public justice could and, in some respects, should look like in a great contemporary metropolis. Like, of course, Toronto.

Chaplin helps us distinguish the governance function that aims to achieve public justice for the myriad of interacting non-government societal spheres, institutions, associations, groupings, both formal and informal, civic amenities (and lack thereof), while pausing to lay out how City (with a capital 'C' to distinguish the public-justice goveranance from the city in toto in the multiformity of its overall populace - in every other respect than that of public-justice governance as such). The professor at the Institute for Christian Studies also deftly factors in the issue of how City finds its best jurisdictional zone of competence and responsibility in relation to State (or, in Canada, Province and Territory) and, it may be added, in relation to the Federal public-justice zone of competence.

In other words, in a brief article, Dr Chaplin puts forward a schematics to take forward the evalution of problems in our urban living that seem sometimes to fall between levels of government. Push-off problems; but also the grab-up opportunities for tier self-aggrandizement over against the other tiers of government. Again, for instance, let's refer to Toronto, with its two government-supported school systems (the secularist govt-controlled schools and the Roman Catholic Church-guided schools). At one point, if I may add to the schooling example cited by Prof Chaplin, yet a second example from the sphere of schooling where, once upon a time, neither the City nor the Province of Ontario set the amount of school taxes, nor determined how the resultant revenues were to be spent. Instead, it was the then-five Toronto-area secularist Boards of Education which set their tax-amounts, budgets, and expenditures; while the Catholic School Board, overlapping the geogrpahy of all five of the secularist boards, set its amounts, budgets, and expenditures (classically, these amounts were lower than the secularist Boards because the Catholic educational system was not fully supported thru grade 12 and because orders of nuns pledged to poverty staffed many Catholic institutions - schools, hospitals, orphanages, etc.).

What was the state's role?, I mean the City's public-justice role? It was to maintain the list of Catholic School Board voters and ensure that their tax-payments for education went to the Catholic Board of Education. Some people who were not Catholics had themselves so listed in order to support that system, so dismayed were they with the secularist system.

Needless to say, government couldn't stand to see a thorougly organized societal sphere financially independent and responsible, quite aside from the ruling party's determinations. In the name of simplicity, not the City, but the Province took over the taxing authority, budgeting, and expenditures of both school systems. It was part of the Province's move toward 'efficiencies' which, of course, would include the closing of many older schools, and the massing of students in ever-more-huge institutions where the main lesson is clique-exostemce, stardom for a few, anomymity for many, and isolation for at least a few of the students bewildered and lost in the mass phenomena of contemporary schooling (among the worst educational phenomena of our times in North America). Parents, parents associations, communities associated around a specific educational philosophy and curriculum, and other arrangements to increase educational diversity were less and less countenanced by the state - no matter how many tiers of government there were, no matter how many struggling alternative schools outside government and Church control.

At present, Ontario has been found guilty of religious discrimination by permitting just two religions - those of secularism and Catholicism - to receive support by taxation, found guilty by a UN Human Rights Commission. An otherwise mean-spirited Conservative Party won my support on the sole issue of its plan (delayed to the bitter end of its time in office) to allocate some educational dollars to parents who could show they schooled their children in one of several smaller third-alternative schools. The Liberal Party in the province won an election in considerable part by refusing to pay-out the monies promised, instead promising to discriminate against third-alternative schooling and the parents who chose it or would choose it had they they means to do so. This effectively disenfranchises Christian parents in poverty from securing a Christian education for their children in Ontario, in Toronto particularly where the immigrant portion of the population is a relatively high percentage.

The irony is that the Liberal Party's leader and head of government was himself a supporter of the tax-supported Catholic school system; had been educated with all his sibs in Catholic schools; and has children of his own these days in those schools. Yet, he decided against equity, and instead of solving the probelm of the UN charge of religious discrimination against Ontario, forthrightly determined to practice it. This bigotry continues to this day.

Well, if you read Prof Chaplin's article, you can sort out for yourself just what is going on in this tangle of misgovernance of tax-support for schools. I urge you to read it if you haven't already. But, I want to mention another issue that comes up for discussion within the parameters of Chaplin's advisory: the pollution of the metropolis of Toronto by our automobiles, the trucks from hither and yon, the buses, the airplanes coming and going from Pearson International Airport. The pollution is so thick, and it is so native, and it is accounted for so much by our own traffic (not manufacturers' smokestacks, as the government likes to pretend in order to blame some other country or level of government). Now, obviously, the City, that is Metro Toronto Council and its Health Department, have some authority to ban automobiles fuelled by polluting fuels. But a more final authority is reserved by the Province to itself or to the Ontario Municipal Board which the government appoints, and tho it perhaps would take a trajector of litgation all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, such that Toronto could undo a reactionary move of the provinical Legistlative Assembly to stop a responsible Health Department and Metro Council in its tracks - no jurisdiction intevenes between exhaust pipes of all those vehicles and my lungs ... or yours. And, while there is much talk of a 'Christian' politics here, no Christian group has emerged to pioneer a path toward public justice against vehicle-pollution generators. Neither the rightwing Christian Heritage Party nor the leftwing Citizens for Public Justice has made so much as a peep to outlaw the tidal wave of polluted air the city generates each day.

The Liberal Party, the same party of bigotry that killed off the feeble last-minute Conservative move to establish equality of tax-support for all educational phliosophies and the various school systems now struggling without assistance (the parents of whose children neverthless pay the full amount in taxes), this same Liberal government sits supine in the face of the gravest crisis Toronto and much of the rest of the province has: clean fresh air. The Liberal Party can't take seriously the enormity of the problem, and so subsidizes foreign auto manufacturers to set up shop in the province, without any rules stipulating what kind of cars can be produced. The cars and trucks made in the province should be legislated to consist only of those free of pollution-driven engines. Instead, the province wants to blame other jurisdictions for a problem that is largely the creation of our own businesses (trucks, airplanes), citizenry (cars, motor bikes, boats, snow mobiles), and government (buses, trucks, cars, limos, snow plows, etc.). The mere transformation of City and Provincial vehicles, and taxicabs, to non-polluting fuels, would be a significant step at this stage to a betteer way of life, and greatly improved public justice in these matters.

With these two issues, a Christian politics active in Toronto for Toronto and all its peoples, would have its hands full for quite some time. - )wlb