Elect Bob Rae in Toronto Centre!

Monday morning went for a walk through Regent Park, the fifty year old public housing development. This on the Monday after four people were killed by gun violence, one of them an eleven year old boy caught in the middle of a gunfight at Jane and Sheppard. Michael Bryant says - once again - it's time for another government to get tough on guns and gun crime. Of course he's right, but my walk this morning brought home the second half of the mantra, "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime". Housing has become the great orphan of social and economic policy in Canada. Regent Park would have been started with federal money, with provincial dollars thrown in as well. A steady transfer of federal dollars in housing was there until the 1980's, but the province was more or less absent except for seniors' housing. When the Peterson-Rae Accord (remember that one ?) was signed in 1985, the province got back into the housing game, but the feds were backing out, to the point of virtual extinction. There was more social housing, co-op and mixed income in that decade, and especially after 1990 (another date that for some reason sticks in the memory) than every before. When Harris came in 1995, the province abandoned the field, leaving whatever could be done to the city. This is the most dramatic example of the downloading that has caused such a ruckus this past week.

So housing is now an orphan, not the only one (child care is another). The feds are out of it. The province is afraid to get back in lest it take on responsibility alone. The city can't afford to invest, maintain, or expand. We have less support for housing than any other country in the OECD. The re-development at Regent Park goes along, with the important goal of providing higher quality housing, and the possibility of a mixed income community, with normal streets, normal garbage pick-up, normal policing and community services, but no real support from either the province or the feds.

And a child is killed in a gunfight. Tougher gun laws, of course. But tougher on the causes of crime ? The federal government is responsible for immigration, but takes no responsibility for the ensuring challenges of integration, work, and settlement. The provincial government downloads housing to the city, and washes it hands. The city staggers through a fiscal crisis, with calls for "Miller days" and deeper cuts, while every study known calls for more and better investment in people, in jobs, in training,in housing, in policing and community services. Our federalism has become seriously dysfunctional, and we suffer as a result. Time for a "new federalism", you bet, but it has to be one where responsibilities are unambiguous and where we realize as a country that we can't afford to keep on going this way. For the feds to salt away 13 billion every year and the real condition of the people to be languishing in this way is simply ridiculous. And a child is killed in a gunfight.