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THE STATE OF OUR TORONTO.

Thank you for connecting to this site to find out who Mark State is. It's hoped you'll discover that you have made a very good investment of your time. This Home Page contains a lot of information about the nature of the city, its current difficulties, and potential remedial courses of action. Click on links at the top left of the page for commentary and insights on various posted topics.

Why have a website? So that you the voter can read my platforms and make an informed choice. You may listen to and read the representations of other candidates and compare them with mine in here. Perhaps you'll then be better able to discern who is running for the office of Mayor as a "prize", and who is running because his heart, energy, and intelligence are committed to the best interests of Toronto.

About this Website

This website refers to life and the future in Toronto; although some of the ideas presented can be generalized to most world locales.


Why write about life and the future in a website that's supposed to be about running for Mayor of Toronto?

The mayor is supposed to know the details of the city's doings, it's true; but more than that, he's supposed to be the leader of its government, put there by a majority vote because he has shown beyond all doubt that he's the one who wants to provide the best care-giving of your city amongst all the candidates for the job. I want to earn your vote.

Being Mayor is about life and the future in Toronto.

Our affluent society may be experiencing a downward trend. Instances of social entropy (weakening, decay) are becoming ever more prevalent.

When we know why this is occurring, we can examine ways to repair it. A long list of items having to do with restoring the peace, comfort, beauty, economic well-being, and affluence of Toronto cry out for remediation; and could, with the right application of energy, receive much-needed attention and effective husbandry.

The Face Of Decline:

• The city's budget seems continually inadequate to provide a full range of normal services and maintenance of its infrastructure while at the same time generating adequate and/or lifestyle-enhancing advancements and improvements without trading one off for the other. There just isn't enough money for the city to be able to do everything it's supposed to for its taxpayers; and it's such an obvious problem that every Mayoralty candidate will --just watch it happen-- make it a part of his or her platform.
• Unemployment and poverty strike a significant proportion of our population and threaten even greater numbers.
• In Toronto, our road conditions are poor.
• Traffic snarls are the rule instead of the exception.
• Our natural environment is suffering from lack of aesthetic and environmental remediation; and our waste disposal systems are struggling to keep up. The management of greenery, especially in parklands and city streets, is more often than not less than pleasing to the eye.
• Our built environment continues to grow in an aesthetically haphazard manner. Street scenes, even with new building, are ungraceful. There is no organized incentive for property owners to beautify their homes. Many streets filled with good folks living on them look unkempt and shoddy with overhead wiring, not enough trees, and cracked and crumbling roadways and sidewalks. The view of the waterfront is obscured from the majority of the city. Some new neighbourhood architecture is depressing in its monotony and lack of frontage landscaping.
• Our children are constantly challenged to keep up with the rest of the world in educational achievement, and many of them live troubled lives where their only solace is the company of others in street gangs.
• In many residential parts of the city people have to wait fifteen or twenty minutes or longer for a bus or streetcar, and there's no needed all-night or holiday service. In some areas, residents have to walk several blocks before arriving at a public transit stop.
• TTC pedestrian assistance development is delayed by financial inadequacy.
• New plans for LRT routes are, incredibly, being deliberately devised to be disastrous to local traffic.

This is a small sampling of some of the most obvious challenges to our culture.

The Face Of Remedy:

The bottom line is, change in key areas of approach to our city's future can add up to a recovery from everything that we sense is keeping us in relatively unimaginative sameness now; and beyond that, bring our children a proud future.

Anyone can point out weaknesses in how city hall has administered its responsibilities. Most have no idea of the difficulty of the job: a huge economic juggling act whose approaches to management stem from years of established procedures.

Breaking free of retrograde procedures --held in place by custom and established impediments that inhibit forward progress-- must be part of the solution to cut the chains that hold the city back from being able to escape its repetitive rhythms of non-progress.

My willingness to expend energy in a closer examination of our current goals, aims, and methods of doing city business in what custom and history has viewed as elements of progress reveals potential remedies to the critical reviews I write so that I don't feel like I'm just a complainer.

It's those potential remedies that I hope you will find interesting and entertaining.

What are the reasons for Toronto's inability to stop its wheel-spinning?

Is there a flaw in the system that is preventing Toronto from avoiding its current rate of entropy?
There are two main perplexities that arise when considering the source of the city's current decline:

(a) Why there simply is not enough money in the city's tax base or available from the Provincial or Federal governments to accomplish the comprehensive running of the city.

(b) Why our system of managing the public wealth is inefficient and immobilized in the doldrums of repetition of bad choices.

The current city government is locked into established retrograde customs that promote the decay of a once-proud metropolis.

How may this be remedied?

There is no single answer to a long list of ills. During this election, some long-in-the-tooth political lightweights will come up with foolish ideas to alleviate the problem, like selling off the city's assets for cash, or cutting back on governmental or infrastructure expenses in some undefined or generalized fashion, often inspired by the headlines of the day.

The remedies are fairly straight-forward, and remember, you saw them here first, before the other candidates decided to parrot them to you second-hand.

1. Simple economic reform: The city needs to discover ways to bootstrap its own wealth.
It's obvious that if Toronto is made independent from its current reliance upon senior government for continual supplementation as both a result of and resulting in its current erratic budgeting, it can forge a more positive future, including

• lifting the dignity of its downtrodden,
• enriching its entrepreneurial base, and
• creating a city remarkable throughout the world as an exemplar of a beautiful human environment.

2. Strong direction from a city council free to pursue a different variety of issue-based agenda: Council needs to be streamlined, improved, and provided with a direction towards which the city can develop a cogent future.

New programs and reforms need to have a future-oriented template against which they can be evaluated. Its direction, and the direction of its decision-making bodies need to have a focus to keep them on track.

Why? Not having a focus or direction leads to the city's current ill-advised spending practices.

Anyone who knows how to keep a budget can tell you that the best way to manage your money is to first earn the money, and then spend it.

Toronto operates under the burden of a multi-billion dollar deficit. The city is spending borrowed money before it's earned; and then after it spends, trying to earn or tax it back quickly or beg senior government to give it freely from budgets previously allocated to other cities and towns. This is fiscal irresponsibility.

Because paying back money on which interest is being paid becomes a drain on Toronto's budget, the city looks for fast routes to making more money. Through uncontrolled development and infrastructure expenditures, the city sacrifices its fiducial integrity on the altar of making that quintessential pay-back buck.

In such a climate, no attention can possibly be paid to the future of the city because every decision has to be made for 'right now'.

3. The city needs to get out of the 'right now' frame of mind of spending before it earns; and allocate its budget items based upon a longer-term future vision. It needs to stop spending irresponsibly.

4. The world of medicine has discovered that an enhanced appearance can lead to a better frame of mind and a better chance of recovery. In the list of remedial changes, let's not overlook an examination of how the city may be brought to resounding health and beauty.

Amongst other improvements of a more subtle nature, we need to feel better about ourselves. Toronto needs a beautification makeover.

5. The economics situation of the city is another area where remedial work is needed. It needs economic relief from the cost of living for its citizens. And it needs to develop its basic resources and energy to look freely at the future it wants to create for itself.

The Difficult Part Of Reform

Reforms are never completely welcome. They seem complicated and difficult: nobody likes change. The current president of the United States was elected on a platform of CHANGE because the citizenry of that country realized that the status-quo was not getting them anywhere useful. When they asked themselves whether they were able to undertake that needed change, they said, "Yes, we can!" What they were really saying is, "We are willing to try to improve things in a deliberate manner."

With a mindset of wanting to improve, people see that improvements can be made and work solutions for them. The leadership that offers to keep that awareness alive for them is the one that allows them to rise to the next level of betterment.

Look around you and ask yourself, is Toronto getting anywhere useful? We have lots of increased infrastructure and development, but does anybody know whether more of those elements is, in the final analysis, where we should be putting our energy?

If all we do is add more infrastructure and more development, what guides the city's growth?

What will Toronto look like fifty years from now?

More of the same, but bigger?

A hodgepodge porcupine of a city with giant concrete quills sticking out here and there all over it?

Traffic jams? Toll roads?

The same old downtown streetcar system gussied up with fancy new streetcars running down the middle of our major streets?

Is that the legacy we want to leave our children? Is that the best we can do for them? Isn't there a very nice future the city can plan for itself? If there were and we could see the future to know what it looked like, we could compare it with what we do in the present --step by step-- so we can see whether we are growing toward it.

What's the solution to these perplexities?

Perhaps it is time to improve some of the ways we approach city governance.

Some nitty-gritty changes might be good for us; for example, change in key areas of how we tackle our city's overall well-being.

What Is The Evidence Of "Stuckness"?

Pollution: After a good many years spent talking it up, we're not green yet. Our garbage is an unresolved issue, all of our streams and rivers, lakes and ponds are still heavily polluted. We can't swim in them, or safely eat whatever fish still survive in them. Our inadequately informed civic leadership has given us advice that is unsound about becoming green at home (CFL's, 1.6 gal flush toilets, "improved" fossil fuel generating stations, inhibited traffic flows, trying to get rid of plastic shopping bags by charging a nickle for them -- all these present more drawbacks than benefits; and there are better and more useful alternatives to them). People who have tried to generate their own electricity have been penalized for it. There is no economic incentive to promote green-ness in the community; only rhetoric, token instances showing example greening solutions, and conferences, committees, and discussions by politicians who have a strong feeling that something really needs to be done but no idea of what that might be.

Poverty: Straightforward evidence of a downward trend in city care is readily available: look around you. Poverty mars our main streets in the form of homeless people sleeping on the corners of second-grade roads while fancy high rises poke the sky. The poor panhandle for a living or have to go to shelters and food outlets for the most basic of daily human needs. Not only they, but previously employed and relatively well-off people are having difficulty finding work.

Decline: Many of our properties are developing a run-down look because people either can't afford to care for them or can't be bothered because the city offers them no sense of pride in living here.

Questionable Decision-Making: We are about to spend a billion dollars for new streetcars, a technology that is 115 years old, and fraught with all kinds of operational hindrances. While a more streamlined variety of streetcar offers a pleasant-looking legacy to Toronto from the departing current civic government, what real improvement do they offer in terms of city betterment?

The Rising Cost Of Living: Commodity prices that directly affect the cost of living are considered 'healthy' when they are escalating at an inflationary rate. Why is it that when our pocket books have difficulty keeping up with rising costs, they don't seem to be factored in to the 'healthy'-ness of the economy?

Poor Traffic Control: Our traffic control systems are messy and disorganized. Traffic snarls are the rule, not the exception. If you are a motorist or otherwise involved in constant slow-motion traffic and rush-hour or other snarls, you should know that there is technology that could prevent those inconveniences completely. It is here now, and can be implemented on Toronto streets. If traffic can be moved efficiently on the streets in the city, the lessened load on the rush-hour expressways would be diminished to the point where the words "rush hour" no longer seem so ironic.

Unequal Senior Care: Seniors are not being equally well-cared-for in all of our seniors' residences, and are continually threatened financially. When they live alone, their well-being becomes jeopardized when the weather is too cold or too hot, when not enough food is available, or when physical access or getting around becomes an overwhelming difficulty. Some can not afford to buy proper nutrition. These are the folks responsible for giving us our current affluent lifestyles. They contributed to society all their younger lives, and now that they are older and less able to defend themselves against the vicissitudes of life, live marginalized lives.

Governmental Short-Sightedness: All are examples of how a city government can tangle itself into an entropic state by not only placing emphasis on the wrong values; but more than that, by enacting a form of government decision-making that results directly from those values, because they inhibit the ability to rise above pressing daily issues to a bigger picture governed by direction, where decisions regarding growth may be deliberated with some degree of guidance.

The province is in a spiral of more-of-the-same infrastructure expansion as well:

• Ontario's premier in the not-so-ancient past spoke happily in favour of spending public dollars to continue our electricity generating dependence on atomic energy, arguably the filthiest polluter of any form of energy generation because it generates deadly toxic waste that takes literally hundreds of thousands of years to deteriorate, until that effort was stopped at its inception by an outside agency. Who stopped it? The commercial firm designated to do the job when it discovered it couldn't make a profit from it. Meanwhile, the lack of upload-regulating technology in place by hydro actively discourages local, low-cost, residentially-generated power.
• In an effort to improve transport of commuters, more trains and more tracks are being added to the existing rail lines without some really basic questions about what more current alternatives might already be in use by other cities in other countries all over the world.

Poor Bicycle Route Planning: Cyclists --who for some strange reason continue to place their faith in a TTC that has yet to justify their trust-- are unable to freely travel through the city, especially in the so-called 'improved' public transit renovaton areas, and they and motorists present a problem for each other.

Cutbacks In Public Services: We have to close schools, swimming pools, and community centers because we can't afford to maintain them. We and other major cities in Ontario and the rest of Canada lost responsibility and control of our school board to our provincial government for the same reason.

Increased Violent Crime: Street slime --people who have deliberately chosen to make their living from evil action-- make our neighbourhoods dangerous to life and limb by remaining free to rob, murder, and deface us.

Desperation Decision-Making At City Hall: The list of our civic governance inadequacies is enormous. There are enough problems to create an entire website for the problems alone. Some of the problems within city council itself include:

Excuses being made for why we must accept the inadequate pace of remedial change to the city; or why we must accept selling off our city's Waterfront Park Reserve birthright to developers in order to pay for our misguided lust for more infrastructure and development. These rationalizations usually begin with the insufficiency of the city's taxation abilities to cover the costs of any remediation. Meanwhile, enormous amounts are being spent on foolish purchases, such as poor infrastructure repair planning and the above-mentioned streetcars.

Questionable Continuation Of Streetcar Transit: Were you aware that when comparing the carbon footprint of streetcars and buses, buses are cleaner because streetcars slow traffic and cause it to stop while loading passengers, resulting in the burning of more fossil fuel by hindered automobiles than by buses moving more swiftly and freely between stops; and it takes more metal manufacture and recycling to build and maintain streetcars than buses? Being able to move around impediments such as other stalled buses and road accidents makes buses more versatile than streetcars that line up when one in the lead experiences a hold. The ability to drop passengers off on the sidewalk instead of the middle of the road also makes buses safer. Not only are buses capable of carrying the passenger load in the city, but they are evolving to become sustainable transportation almost as fast as cars.

The current purchase of a fleet of new streetcars ensures that a relatively inefficient form of public transit will continue for another twenty to thirty years. We are told that the purchase is a good thing because the new streetcars are prettier and lower to the ground and will run up the centers of rush hour routes forcing commuters to use them instead of cars. Will you stop using your car (or bicycle) and take public transit instead?

Ignoring The Needs Of -- Or Worse, Hindering-- Traffic: Statistics Canada says that several million commuter trips each year are made in and out of the city in cars by people who do not wish to use public transit. Without being certain that these people are willing to get up earlier in the morning and give up their automobile travel to take public transit, the TTC's wishful thinking that people will be forced to switch as it narrows those rush hour routes with reserved-lane streetcars will only result in one thing. The automobile users they thought would switch to public transit will clog their deliberately traffic-inhibited routes to a stop.

· The City's Cash-Strapped Status: The enormity of the number of issues that have to be resolved, and the perceived cost of resolving them, are frightening prospects to a cash-strapped council who can't see any way out of its predicament.

• development priorities that place new, mainly downtown residential and civic building in as priority projects intended to improve the wealth of the city by providing more upscale housing with no coherent future planning as to the impact on the remainder of the city are short-sighted.

• budgetary allotments being set aside to create more parks instead of improving the ones we have.

• closing of swimming pools while the city tries to get the Board Of Education to pay for them. Neither can come up with enough money to keep less than half of them open. The swimming citizenry loses a resource, and children who don't have a place to learn to swim drown.

• inadequate funding of our children's educations results in an overall poor comparison with other countries on a par with Canada economically, forcing some local schools to adopt an overseas curricula so their students can compete equally for positions in the universities right here in Ontario. The results of an inadequate education budget are felt more widely than in the areas of academe. They also have negative sociological consequences.

How The City Has Learned To Cope

City government has learned to cope in the barest manner by experience. If it complains enough, and 'cries poor' enough, it can always hope for economic support from senior forms of government to save it from its shortfalls --where it needed to, but had not prioritized to, avoid shortfalls because it has always looked at "more is better" rather than "what are we doing, and why?".

As you ask questions or hear media news broadcasts, information you receive runs continually and often frustratingly contrary to your concerns. The resulting puzzlement, disappointment, and feeling of powerlessness, can be frustrating to those who sense it from time to time in their lives. Perhaps you have a pet beef that you wish the city would "fix". Seen any action on it lately? Why not?

· Reform Is Possible

None of this is necessary. I can understand why those we elect don't effect the measures that will restore vibrancy and good living in every corner of this city. Because city council establishes its decision-making patterns on years of precedent, I think it never occurred to them to examine its efficiency. Not only does the city government not know how to make positive changes in this regard, its difficulties are enhanced by establishing boards of advisers whose livelihood will be increased if they advise the city to keep on doing what it does, and in the same way, only moreso.

Perhaps city council hasn't learned about how large corporations and other cities are successfully tackling similar issues to those we now face. Maybe they are afraid of making necessary changes because they're uncomfortable with anything that isn't something they have done before. Maybe both.

There is an unexamined plan for achieving what's necessary and obvious in order to remedy the current ills of the city. In order to succeed, the steps of the remedy must be planned to echo far into the city's future.

Amongst the other issues they addresses, pages in this website may be found that portray management methods that affect every aspect of life in Toronto in a positive manner. The methods combine economic recovery and strength-building with applied programs of deliberate future planning to maintain control over a corrected service system, solve the city's money shortage, housing dilemma, waste disposal problems, straighten out the traffic snarls the city is plagued with, reduce all crime to near-zero levels; and in short, as the humourists phrase it, "cure what ails us".

· The methods are based in common sense and ingenuity. Many of them feature "future planning", resulting from a scheme called a "future plan". It's important to underline that a future plan is not a cure. It's not an answer that is going fix things up as soon as it's implemented. It's a route and a remedial opportunity that enables clarity in decision making because it offers clear philosophical direction.

· Doesn't the city already have a future plan?

Counter-arguers to this website will point out that the province and the city already have a 'development plan', and they do . It's variously called the Ontario 'Place To Grow' act of 2005, the Toronto Official Plan of 2002, and most recently, the Greater Toronto Area Economic Summit of May 2009.

However, each of these Official Plans --with an exception of two sections in the GTAES entitled "investing in our human capital", and "Tax incentives to support desired outcomes and behaviours, such as building the green technology sector"; and one section in the PTG Act: 2005, c. 13, s. 1. "to ensure that a long-term vision and long-term goals guide decision-making about growth and provide for the co-ordination of growth policies among all levels of government" --are based entirely on the principle of 'more-of-the-same'; and rather than opening up the city and area to a bright beautiful future are unfortunately and unalterably destined to keep Toronto, the GTA, and the province mediocre.

One will note that the Ontario government has interpreted its own act in this instance; and rather than emphasizing the word "guide" has chosen to emphasize the word "growth", meaning "grow bigger and more projects", such as the 'Metrolinks' project in conjunction with the GTA. This misled path of 'more growth is healthy' is causing Ontario to begin facing the same kinds of economic stress held by Toronto, and for the same reasons. Often, money is re-routed from civic projects in other Ontario cities and towns to be used to cover Toronto-and-area's grander projects because Toronto is regarded by the province as being the 'economic engine' of Ontario. Hence, more economic independence by the city would be in the best interests of a cash-strapped province.

Toronto's Official Plan has nothing in it to relieve any of the disorder, confusion, and disarray just mentioned in any realistic fashion. Instead of determining how the future might appear to people living in the city long after we have begun to provide for their circumstances, it deals with "healthy growth"; meaning that as long as increases in infrastructure and development are taking place, everything is all right. The forward-looking parts of the Official Plan don't get past 14, 15, or at best 25 or so years into the future. If it looks good now, it must be OK...and only "more of the same" looks good for now because the city needs money and only knows how to get it though traditional methods.

· How Are City Council Meetings Currently Run?

The current form of civic governance is government by issue. City council's daily grind is concerned with trying to resolve problems facing the city on an issue by issue basis. It's a very complex system that requires councillors to become instant experts on a huge variety of topics, and long intricate discussions necessary to reach reasonable conclusions assure the city that its council of representatives will remain stuck in a very slow and unproductive overall management time line resulting in little or painfully slow progress. Having an additional impediment to progress whose root cause seems to be various councillors empowered to hold pet issues, personal ambition, and a very short civic vision sometimes has the issues solved by deal-making...a method that places constituents' needs after those of some representatives, and after the budgetary needs of other constituents in other wards.

· How Can This Be Improved?

Recognition and repair of this existing mechanism of civic government can provide the opening of an opportunity for a future-oriented, crime-free, sweet, clean, calm and reasonable Toronto to become future reality.

What's needed to repair these basic difficulties in civic management is

• a clear perspective not on an issue-by issue form of governance that can cloud and 'red-herring' corrective measures; but much more importantly to establish a scheme that supports development and implementation of an overview that will allow issue governance and rectification to be achieved with greater efficiency and direct, pertinent results.
• Some of the governance can be moved outside of council; not through traditional governmental department management, and not into committees, but through directed and orderly forms of citizen participation. There is a caveat implied in this kind of governance, because we have frequently seen government corporations getting out of control. In order to avoid messes like eHealth, Toronto Hydro, Canada Post, --another huge list--
• new entities of this kind would have to be directly responsible to council for approving their decisions, so the more thorough a job of reportage and legislation preparation they do, the more likely their desires are to be passed by council.

Some of my own ideas for rectification of these standard procedures and faulty solution mechanisms are identified throughout this website.

· As a part of them, the willing and active participation of the affected citizenry becomes central to making the corrections. "Yes, we can!" is more achievable when the citizenry knows what it is they can do.

· The problem of 'more-of-the-same' has been a long-standing one, so the rectification process may at first be effort-full, but only until the corrective results are achieved. The rest then becomes smooth sailing, because believing and working towards Toronto's future will have become 'business-as-usual' with new and slightly different guidelines that are more supportive to the human community they serve.

The Human Environment

Your life and that of your friends and neighbours has been affected by global and local changes, issues, and circumstances we all wish were not beyond our individual ability to control. Our basic human nature is evolving to think civilly, with a brain that is --according to the evidence-- designed to think about its own welfare first, before the welfare of others. As a species, we're becoming more responsible for ourselves and our environment. We name this form of evolution "civilization" and "character".

More and more people are beginning to link survival of the species with their own survival; and thus are thinking civilly. Ethnologists theorize that one of the first indications of the trait of civil thinking began to emerge with the Yuman ancestors of the Hopi and Pima Maricopa Indians in Arizona, who over 2000 years ago decided that every plan for the present must be considered in the light of its impact on the seventh unborn generation. That would have been about 140 years. They did this by considering the impact of their actions on their physical environment, and determining how they would likely benefit or become a difficulty for generations in the future.
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· Palm Tree Entrance
Photo in Maricopa, Arizona from "Google Maps"

View in By gat001
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· Nowadays, the seventh generation occurs approximately every 200 years, and rapidly developing and changing technology makes decisions about how people will live in the future an impractical exercise.
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· It is possible, however, to practice the future planning methods still employed by the Prima Maricopa Nation in and around their Southern Arizona environment in cooperation with their non-Indian neighbours credited with making that corner of the United States famed far and wide for its incredible beauty and the pleasant living conditions of its people. In order to effect it, all they do is consider all their plans in the light of how they will affect future generations.

When a similar style of careful planning begun by we, who died seven generations ago is felt by those who experience Toronto 200 years hence --and who are in their turn continuing to perpetuate this method of preparing the future for as-yet unborn generations-- perhaps they will appreciate the legacy we have given them more than had we left a legacy of hodgepodge development and increased infrastructure. Humans have a very good grasp on what it is we want to give the future; because as a species, we are good at surmising possible futures.

We are also more than ever now aware that not planning for the future will eventually cause the disappearance of our species.

If you are intrigued by the idea of planning things for the beauty and to the benefit of future generations, some of the ideas presented throughout the rest of this website will intrigue you. It has as its central core of concern the idea of developing Toronto's human environment in the light of how future generations will live here.

Many of the thoughts in this website deal with how you as a citizen of Toronto in particular and the world in general can arrange to stop being fooled and deliberately cheated of certain of your basic human rights. To understand how this is happening, you have to step 'out of the box' and view the situation objectively.
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· Why Does The World Seem To Be In Disarray?
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· The first thing you need to know is that no one or group of persons in particular is causing the disarray of society.

[To promote the idea that somehow we are 'being controlled' is to abdicate an opportunity to take personal responsibility for things as they are and fix them up. Strangely, those who feel most impotent in their civic lives are most likely to fall prey to 'conspiracy theories' that just end up keeping them impotent by convincing them that impotence is a positive state of being.

The idea of others controlling our lives is a deliberate attempt to make people feel helpless so that they will not take action to fix things up. It is itself a marketing-ploy conspiracy to paralyze society by the perpetuators of the popular pastime of conspiracy theorizing themselves, who derive a perverse joy out of seeing others paralyzed by irrational fears into feeling that the only course of action open to them is that of developing postures of super-defensiveness and bigotry; and then sell them the tools to "survive" their imagined calamity. It does this by telling them that remedies are beyond their control because the causes of social 'rights' deprivation are in the hands of the "powerful few". The disarray caused by the inaction thus produced is generalized to a lesser extent to all of us, and is endemic within our society whenever the ubiquitous "they" are blamed for our ills.]
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· What Is The Evidence Of Forward Movement?

Hand in hand with human development and progress, both the constructs of governance and corporate affairs have been evolving and developing. The uncivilized part of the human brain, linked solely with individual survival, seems irrelevant to this process.

Without a preplanned, developmental overview that controls that aspect of government and corporate behaviour called "human responsibility toward the survival of the species", both of these community-style formations would evolve in an erratic and uncontrolled manner. In a seeming self-contradiction, both the positive and negative effects we have noticed about both these constructs are due to the very nature of their central purpose and operational method, all having to do with individual survival, but based upon group survival.

The purpose of corporate affairs is to remain true to its responsibility to provide profit to shareholders. Failure to do this can literally land corporate executives in jail for breach of fiduciary trust.
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· The purpose of government is to resolve the issues facing the electorate. Failure to do this can result in election of a new government. When governments succeed in maintaining their purpose, they survive. If they don't, they fold.

Corporations fulfil this purpose often in a manner blindfolded to the greater responsibility of world citizenship and the recognition of basic human intelligence; causing us a vague discomfort and legitimate concerns about collateral damages caused by their blinkered directionality.

Governments in survival mode often revert to issues more visible to the public attitude than those broader and more essential solutions found within responsible management of governed affairs, due to their perceived necessity to retain popularity and achieve re-election.
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· How May Toronto Be Improved?

The current administration of Toronto, to give them all the credit they deserve, work very hard to benefit the city as best they can. And within the opportunities provided by their approach to civic governance, they have succeeded as well as anyone can be expected to.

Where the progress of the city has become stalled or misdirected, however, the fault ironically lies with that same approach by those same individuals in running the city's infrastructure and finances. Time, the final judge and arbiter as to whether we have done well, will judge the impact of their contributions.

Citizens complain, however, and we hear --rightly or wrongly-- that the visibility of improvements of the current city council seems to be superficial; and that many of the same general difficulties that the current administration took office pledging to alleviate still exist, due mainly to lack of funding.

Clearly some thought about new approaches to old problems --ones that work-- is indicated.

It's hoped that persons currently in office in city hall --and you, reading these pages-- will recognize some usefulness in some of the ideas presented in here on how to repair Toronto .
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· You may have watched various groups, including the province and the Economic Summit try to parallel these ideas already, but it's my opinion that they will achieve only a superficial success because in order to be implemented, the ideas require changes and citizen support that will take them a long time to develop. The ideas seem fresh and workable to them; but nobody understands that time must be taken to create the machinery and research how to support and drive the challenges represented by the ideas in this website. They apply them to the only concepts with which they are familiar: more growth founded in development and infrastructure. Only the depth and effort of establishment of works guided by a longer-range view, however, can usefully succeed in the 'making changes' component of endeavour along with a genuine desire to leave a legacy to our descendants.

Without any fresh thinking processes about rectification of the city's woes, people in charge of running council remain subject to the way things have always been done; a way of doing things that while being difficult and producing only a modicum of success, provides comfort like a favourite chair or a worn-out pair of gardening pants.
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· "Change" means inevitable discomfort and exploration of unfamiliar territory: setting new objectives and tuning them up to make them work effectively...a scary proposition.
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· Partly, leadership at the civic government level has been a reflection of fear of change from the ways things "have always been done."
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· New leadership at the civic government level will be the key motivator in changing things for the better.
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· The Answer

OK, Mark. Just what are these changes you are proposing?

The reality is that Toronto may go a long way to general health and a bright, prosperous future by following a novel two-pronged approach. Both aspects of this approach have far-reaching consequences that can deliver beneficial changes to the city in ways and with speed that (compared to the snail's pace of non-progress we have been experiencing for the past 60 years or so) we will consider nothing short of amazing and have us glowing with pride at how well we're doing.
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· They are:

• · create new wealth for a considered development of the city and well-being of Toronto's citizenry.
• Change the nature of the method of council meetings and decision-making at city hall.

Both have aspects that go hand in hand. Both require a radical departure from the way things are now done in city government, and both embrace the future as a vision of how Toronto can be when it is at its best.
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· A Note For The Faint-Of-Heart

If you are unable or unwilling to see that this city is mired in its own 'business as usual' approach to its operations, then explain why Vancouver and Philadelphia look like lovely gardens when you drive around the city streets, and Toronto only has a few lovely neighbourhoods sparsely located and dependent upon, with a few notable exceptions, wealth and gardening companies.
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· Train your Google Map on southern Arizona, and explore the areas from Phoenix south, around the Maricopa area, and further south. See whether you can find the canal built by the Yumans 2000 years ago, and what it looks like now.
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· Look for photos in this website of the greening of various cities. Check out the comparisons of some cities' takes on greening the city, and compare their homes, high rises, and bridges, etc., with Toronto and the self-proclaimed 'world-leading' roof greening ventures being made by us.

Try to explain why New York City, with a population more than double that of Toronto has traffic jams that are minor compared per capita to those in Toronto; and Hamilton has few if any at all and even fewer per-capita business public transport commuters.

Think about why there is not enough money in our coffers, even after the city was granted a charter that enabled it to raise taxes (which nobody at city council wanted to do) to temporarily house our poor and needy neighbours, keep the public swimming pools open, adequately fund the education system, repair the roads, effectively and ecologically manage garbage disposal, provide adequate bicycle pathways, adequately provide facilities and programmes for the majority of its senior citizens, clean up the lakes and rivers running through and around the city, operate a free-flowing traffic system, and provide adequate public transit to all parts of the city.

If you agree that any of the above represents improvements Toronto needs to make, then just consider that --maybe-- doing things another way can solve all of these problems and more.

The simple solution, described below, is based upon two key suppositions. Our current vision of Toronto's future falls short because

• our city politicians' time is being taken up in resolving the minor day-to-day issues that confront the city rather than being released to take a visionary overview and manage based upon that vision;
• and even if they were not so-involved, the money to create a future for Toronto doesn't exist here. Yet.

"Business as usual" at city hall in terms of finding extra funding for city projects was as follows. When a Toronto Mayor needed to find extra cash, he would go to the province and to the federal government asking for money. The amount requested either never showed up, or by the time it did it was insufficient and came with directions from the donating government as to where it could be apportioned. Nothing progressed adequately, and more cash and requests necessarily followed, with Mayors and city councils in a continual state of frustration because of the resulting feelings of impotence thus forced upon them.
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How to proceed

So? So we begin a new path to prosperity. We create more capital and free up the city councillors to create a beautiful city for the future, based upon its citizens' vision. Can this be done? You bet!

The ability of the city to create its own capital directs a future path of general gainful employment for all Toronto's citizenry, good housing and education standards, tax benefits, more lucrative civic ventures, and a more powerful --and appreciated-- position in both Queens' Park and Ottawa.

The idea of governance by future planning based upon vision is not some hocus-pocus idea of visiting a psychic to determine what to do next. Government by future vision is the methodology employed by all the world's largest and most successful corporations. It positions the city to calmly and constructively face a future we can already see will be beset with myriad issues and handle them all magnificently so as to create a genuinely enjoyable, beautiful city whose parts all work well in harmony together, and engages the citizenry at grass roots to help create it.

It looks at a city whose future has been arrived at by a flexible consensus and works toward achieving that as a vision.
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Employing this two-pronged approach to future city government will have the effects of removing lack of cash as a reason to inhibit progress, alleviate the city's problems; and remove Government-By-Issue.

NOTE: Try clicking on a blue link in the box at the top left of this page, where you can read an in-depth examination of some of the above topics, such as : HOW TORONTO MIGHT IMPROVE ITS ECONOMIC PROSPECTS DURING THIS DOWNTURN , and other topics of interest to Torontonians.