2023 mayoral by-election

Sometimes the student life of unstable and often-changing housing makes it hard to vote, but I was able to do so easily in today’s Toronto mayoral by-election using my student co-op short-term residency agreement and health card.

I was surprised a couple of weeks ago to see how closely my Vote Compass answers matched up to Olivia Chow, and I was happy to vote for her today and see her win tonight.

The results — left-leaning in the urban core, right-leaning in the suburbs — fit into a major and long-running electoral pattern. In the Toronto case particularly, I will confess to having little sympathy who are willing to let infrastructure and city services decay for the sake of low taxes. It is the dynamism of Toronto that attracts people to all those endless suburbs, and they are killing the golden goose by allowing the city to fall into decay for the sake of lower taxes. If you want ultra-low taxes and no services, go start a subsistence farm in a rural area. If you just want a giant rural-style house from which to drive your SUV to your job at the bank downtown, you need to pay taxes at a level that keeps the city going. You might feel like a capitalist superman who shouldn’t be weighed down by funding parasites, but all that money you’re making comes from the economic dynamism of a place where individual prosperity normally relies upon good underlying social conditions. Things have clearly been badly eroded by the psychological harm of the pandemic, and it will take investments in areas like social services to the unhoused and mental health supports to get Toronto back to where it was pre-2020.

It’s an open question how an ideological sandwich of municipal, provincial, and federal governments will work for Toronto, but at least we don’t have another low-tax ideologue as mayor.

A trend that apparently cannot be sustained

The timing of me getting pushed out of 611A Marlee Avenue seems to have been especially bad.

I have been room-hunting for months now, and what I have mostly seen has been individual rooms in shared apartments for around $1500 and up. That means paying more for a room than I ever have for a whole apartment, and so far none of the rooms I have seen have actually been desirable to live in.

My evening-rest and sleep to meet

I have been finding it rather hard to rest and focus. My temporary accomodation doesn’t so much feel like a home as like a temporary platform from which to urgently seek housing.

I know the long-standing expectation going back decades is that Toronto and Vancouver have challenging housing markets, but things feel like they have been pushed to a higher level. Increasingly for people around me, housing has become the single most determinative factor in their lives, including in whether they have the stability to pursue sounder finances through job progression or education. The way the housing market is operating is strangling the dreams of young people, while leaving them uncertain about whether they can have any kind of desirable future at all.

Adult poverty in Canada

A report from Community Food Centres Canada found:

more than one in five single adults (22 per cent) live below the poverty line… Many working-age single adults rely on low-wage, part-time, temporary employment opportunities that lack benefits and stability. The social support programs in place are outdated and inadequate for the current labor market, contributing to the challenges these individuals face, the report cited.

According to the report, nearly one million working-age single adults are stuck in a cycle of “deep” poverty with an average annual income of $11,700, which is less than half of the $25,252 low-income threshold for a single-adult household.

…

These working-age single adults make up to 38 per cent of all food-insecure households in the country with 61 per cent of them severely disabled living alone below the poverty line, the report said.

The report highlights that nearly half of single adults (47 per cent) live in unaffordable housing compared to 17 per cent in other household types and 81 per cent of shelter users are single adults with low income.

“The evidence is overwhelmingly clear – through woefully inadequate income support programs and a labour market that creates precarity because of low wages and few benefits, we are trapping people in poverty in this country,” Community Food Centres Canada CEO Nick Saul said in a news release published on Thursday.

Their website says: “Two things are very clear: a job is not a pathway out of poverty, and income support for this demographic lags far behind other groups.”