Interview with David Miller, Mayor of TorontoICPC: Mayor Miller (pictured below), you have been in office now for a year and a half - and a City Councillor for nine years. Your vision for Toronto includes building a revitalized city of strong, safe neighbourhoods….. How has your vision been formed, what factors have helped to shape your views vision in relation to safety and security and how to achieve it?
 DM: Well I think a number of things. First of all in our system and as a City Councillor you have a very hands-on relationship with community safety and community building initiatives. So I’ve seen at first hand the needs of communities - what works and what doesn’t - and I represented an area as a Councillor that was extraordinarily diverse in terms of income, and in terms of population background. It was Parkdale High Park, where we had some of the richest Torontonians on Riverside Drive, for example, and some of the poorest in the buildings on 103-105 West Lodge. Photo:www.city.toronto.on.ca
And that’s a very important part: life experience and philosophy. For example, when I was in Grades 7-8, 13-14 years, I went to a school which was partly middle class kids and partly kids from lower-income housing, and I saw first hand how differently the poor kids and the rich kids were treated. If a rich kid got in a fight in the school yard his parents were called, and if a poor kid got in a fight in a school yard the police were called. So really my philosophy and approach with respect to community safety is based on my personal experiences, both as a citizen and as an elected official, and starts from a simple premise that safety starts neighbourhood by neighbourhood because the people in that neighbourhood know their needs best, and know the solutions best.
ICPC: Toronto has a long history of working to promote community safety – for example it was one of the first Canadian cities to promote community plans for women’s safety in the 1980’s, and to set up a task force on community safety in the 1990’s. Internationally, there has been considerable action at the local authority level in promoting community safety and crime prevention over the past 10 or 15 years. Do you see an evolution in thinking about how to tackle community safety in a big city such as Toronto?
DM: Yes I think there has been an evolution in thinking about community safety in big cities. One of the historical facts that’s very important here is the initiatives that were taken in the 80’s and 90’s. [This was] either by the City of Toronto government, which represented what is now the down-town area, or the regional governments. Six cities in the region were amalgamated, so we now represent an extremely large city. So we’re building on the knowledge of the past of what works, but recognizing that the challenges in a very large city, certainly by North American standards, have to be addressed locally, in an effective local way. That’s the best way to promote safety. It’s challenging because you have to have the ability to be flexible and responsive, and you have to work with local neighbourhoods, because collectively the people in the neighbourhood always know the answer.
ICPC: What about in terms of some people’s view of crime prevention as being a police responsibility? There was an FCM (Federation of Canadian Municipalities) survey across Canada a few years ago, which found that the majority of mayors saw crime prevention as a police [and not a municipal] responsibility.
DM: Well the police have an important role, there’s no question about that, they have an important role in crime prevention. They have, obviously, a more important role in law enforcement, but the police are not the only solution. In Toronto we have a proud tradition of strong responsive policing. The leadership of our new Police Chief is going to be very community oriented. But that’s only part of the solution. For example, when we started speaking to people about our Community Safety Plan (CSP), a young man in one of the neighbourhoods, where by Toronto standards there were serious problems, said it’s easier to get a gun than a job. The police can deal with guns, (although parenthetically it’s also a huge border issue in Canada because floods of illegal guns are coming into Canada and they don’t have proper gun control), but jobs are not something the police can produce. One of the important components of our CSP, one of the pillars, is the neighbourhood phase, and the second pillar is that it focuses on the real needs of young people, and an important part of that is employment.
ICPC: You set up your new Community Safety Plan in March 2004, with its nine major 9 components. [link to footnote]* What do you see as some of the main challenges for implementing the plan, eg. in relation to neighbourhood action plans, or the targeting of programmes?
DM: Well first of all, I am immensely proud of the fact that we produced the plan quickly and implemented it, virtually immediately. To have something pass Council in March 2004 when you are sworn in in December 2003, is almost impossible the way our legislative process works. A lot of successes have resulted. The challenge is one of resources, the philosophy of the plan is: target the neighbourhoods where young people are most at risk; work with those neighbourhoods to design their own response, and bring the appropriate resources to bear, whether it is schools being open for more programmes for young people, whether it is jobs, whether it is training through the community colleges, or a number of other initiatives which we have started as a response to the needs of the community. The first challenge is to identify what the real needs are, so that you know that your response is meeting the real needs and therefore is more effective, and the second is to find the resources in a climate of fiscal restraint.
We go to the neighbourhood, invite people in. A very important part of our strategy is to actively involve young people, because our philosophy is to target young people and give them opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have, particularly to try to avoid their engagement in the kind of gang culture. We need to hear directly from them, so we have community meetings with them, very specific, targeted community outreach. On our Community Safety Panel (CSP), which is chaired by the Chief Justice of Ontario Roy McMurtry, we have two youth representatives, Ryan Teschner and Kehinde Bah. We’ve engaged the Universities and the Community Colleges, and our community college system is focused out in community so this is a very helpful way of reaching young people. A member of our CSP is a well-known radio personality from an urban music station. So we’ve tried to be creative and get right to young people. We’ve also met with young people from gangs that have been arrested and are in jail, so we’ve done everything we can in a real way to speak to real young people and to hear their real issues.
ICPC: And in terms of the adult population as well?
DM: Similar kinds of strategies, the urban music station isn’t so relevant to them. We engage the community very directly through community organizations. The City of Toronto is very experienced and very good at public engagement. We use strategies to ensure that we have a broad cross-section of communities. The key to all of that is we’ve focused, we can’t do this everywhere. So we’ve picked three neighbourhoods first, and then added a fourth. We’ll probably add a fifth and a maybe a sixth this year. We’ve build on existing relationships. In James Town in Etobicoke, for example, there are organizations there that represent some of the cultural groups, like the Somali community. We’ve built on some of those relationships to make contact with as much as of the community as possible.
ICPC: Toronto is a very multi-ethnic city, with over 60 languages spoken...
DM: It is probably double that now. The easiest way to think about it is that we have people living here from every country of the world, and in large numbers. In Toronto since World War II there has been growing diversity, but it has really blossomed in the last 20-25 years. It is an amazing strength of our city. It also means that when you are doing consultations like those on community safety, you have to ensure that you contact all the appropriate cultural organizations, but that in a way makes it easier as well.
ICPC: You can see this diversity from the number of women’s organizations in the city concerned with safety who represent different cultural groups….
DM: As it happens, this was how I first got involved while I was an articling law student. I incorporated METRAC (Metropolitan Toronto Action Committee Against Violence Against Women and Children). As a result I become very very aware of the work being done to combat violence against women and children.
ICPC: METRAC certainly stands out in Canada as an example of an organization which has sustained itself [and continues to work on women’s safety…]
What do you see as some of the major challenges to embedding and sustaining the kind of approach set out in the Community Safety Plan? For example, when a new government comes in there is often a lot of energy and charisma, but when that government goes out of office – other people come in with different agendas…….
DM: The biggest needs are employment, training, and recreational and arts and cultural opportunities for young people in communities. We can embed the recreation and arts and cultural opportunities through permanent changes to city programmes, and the way we work with our Public School Boards (there are two in Toronto, District and Catholic), to ensure that schools, which are in every neighbourhood and are the hub of the neighbourhoods, are available for local recreational and arts and other kinds of opportunities. That can be permanently established. We lost some of this when the Harris Government was elected in Ontario, because they cut the funding. We are there on the schools issue, the two School Board chairs are on the CSP. We are also trying to work more closely with the City, so that our recreation programmes work with the schools better, to create a broader range of opportunities for slightly younger youth. So that’s on its way, and that will be very hard for people to remove.
The second challenge is around employment and educational opportunities and training. One of the things we need to do is to institutionalize in Toronto, in the private sector, not just the public sector, the importance of engaging youth who are left out. And we are doing a number of things…. working with University of Toronto, for example, on mentoring programmes so that students can go back to their old neighbourhoods or to other neigbourhoods. We’re working with the private sector: Heenan Blaikie. a law firm has offered internships to youth from the designated communities. We are going to work with them to engage other law firms, accounting firms and banks to do the same thing. We are working with the provincial and federal governments. The province has been terrific, they have helped us create 300 jobs last year and this year, targeted directly to these communities. But we need many more jobs than that, so I think our goal is to institutionalize in the educational community and community colleges, like Centennial who have been terrific providing some training opportunities. There was a young man who graduated from Centennial, who were providing some free courses to kids last summer, who said ‘I have never graduated from anything in my life before’ - incredibly powerful and profound.
We are trying to institutionalize those programmes as well. At some point in time we are going to need our partners in the federal/provincial governments to orient their employment funding in a better way, a more targeted way, and a smarter way. That will help create a permanance. What we are doing all produces tremendous results…..quite demonstrable results, particularly the gains from the employment of a 16 year-old boy in the community where there is nothing, or very little, who is starting to get into trouble. We have had a number of examples of kids just surging in self-confidence from having a twelve-week job. Our goal is within the public and the private sectors to create long-lasting partnerships and programmes, and to ensure the success of that. And of course my goal is to be re-elected. I hope to be here steering this for quite a while.
ICPC: What if you are not re-elected, and if there is a change in the direction of the Council itself?
DM: We have created a Community Safety Secretariat (CSS) for the first time within the City. That guides the neighbourhood safety plans, that guides our investment, that provides Council advice and I think that’s a permanent institution. It is very important, you need an institutional response. It has to be multi-sector, we have Unions supporting us with job training programmes, colleges, universities, United Way, private sector, the Ontario Trillium Foundation, the School Boards, virtually every institution in the City. We haven’t got to hospitals yet, but every other institution is engaged, and the CSS is key to that because it gives us the ability to support all of this work and to steer it in the right direction.
ICPC: One of the biggest issues that most cities come up against, and countries too, is the impact of major and serious events – criminal events – such as a gang shooting - and the media publicity and pressures to be tough. And also things like transnational organized crime and terrorism which are major concerns. Do you see the work you are doing at the community level on the ground as having an impact on those concerns?
DM: Yes, because people are seeing results. Crime is actually down in Toronto, across all statistical categories save one, the one that’s up - marijuana growth-ops - is due to better police enforcement. Everything that’s reported by the public is down. In two of the neighbourhoods, Rexdale and Malvern, crime is down, so we can point to success. The concerns you raised are real, Torontonians share them. We are not a city that ever expected to have shootings to the extent that we have, that’s not our self-image. So there is much, much more to be done. Sometimes the media does very much focus on a terrible tragedy, but if there is a tragedy we are very supportive of the police doing everything that is necessary to bring the people involved to justice, that’s critical. But we are working to ensure a long-run safe city with safe neighbourhoods, and that work goes on in parallel, and if public events cause some attention to be given to some kind of aspect of law enforcement, that’s fine. That does not detract from this work at all. Our work is short-run and long-run. We are trying for immediate results, but laying the foundation for a much safer city in the long run.
ICPC: Do you see any change in attitudes in the population [or the media] in terms of how you should respond to those kinds of incidents?
DM: No, not really. But our Police Chief is very supportive of this work, and his public statements are instrumental in calming people’s fears.
ICPC: Thinking more broadly, cities like Bogota in Colombia or Diadema in Brazil have faced some of the highest levels of homicide in the world in recent years – mainly young men killed by other young men - and now they have achieved some very significant reductions in violence. Other cities with different level of problems, like Birmingham or Manchester in England, have also achieved some good successes. Do you think there are any benefits from city exchanges, from telling other people how you have worked?
DM: Yes, no question. It is very important to be able to share ideas and approaches that work, and also approaches that have been tried and failed, although we have not done as much as would like. Metropolis and FCM are both very helpful in learning from the experience of others, but I was thinking in the context of direct city-to-city exchanges. The organizations we belong to really do help us learn from positive models of others, although a lot of our Community Safety Plan is grounded in what our office understood about Toronto and the best of what Toronto can offer. [Exchanging experiences] is very helpful because even if you’ve got the right direction, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have the right details.
ICPC: What about the long term evaluation and cost-benefits of the project, is this something you have built into the Community Safety Strategy?
DM: Yes, there is on-going monitoring, and after 18 months, the Community Safety Secretariat will evaluate the neighbourhood action initiatives, to give us an increased understanding of safety and violence prevention in the context of building strong neighbourhoods and building healthy communities. We will develop qualitative and quantitative indicators what measure not just the absence of crime, but the conditions in society and its institutions that foster respect, inclusion and the right of all residents to a decent level of income. So that will be an 18 month review this fall.
ICPC: What are you most proud of in terms of the community safety structure that you have established in Toronto?
DM: Well first, that we did it immediately. Second that we’ve changed the focus from enforcement to prevention. Third that it works. Fourth seeing the actual change in the lives of young people, hearing from a young man that he’d never graduated before. And I suppose, fifth the amazing partnership between private and public institutions…[from] everyone we’ve asked to participate and to take an action, we’ve been able to have fast results. If I were to sum it up as one thing, it’s this, that we’ve been able to have fast results, while laying a strong long-run foundation. I’m very proud of that accomplishment.
[*The nine actions in the Community Safety Plan include: establish Mayor’s Advisory Panel; Community Safety Secretariat; neighbourhood action plans in key at-risk communities; targeting programs and services to at-risk neighbourhoods; fast-tracking innovative programs on gun use and gang involvement; engaging corporate sector in developing employment opportunities; advocating with higher government levels on legislation; expanding Community Crisis Response programme; engaging councillors in developing community safety initiatives in their wards.]
Interview conducted on July 12, 2005. |
