02Jul
The following remarks were delivered by Wayne at a June 29 party of 130 people celebrating his ten years with the Toronto Food Policy Council and Toronto Public Health. Liz Janzen, the recently retired director of Toronto Public Health, who did so much to champion the Toronto Food Policy Council and many other bold initiatives, [...]
23Aug
Imitation is the highest form of flattery, and the intricate form of food production practiced by peasants through much of Asia and South America still express that flattery in relation to Nature. In the Global North, all food production except hunting and gathering is commonly referred to as agriculture. But in the Global South, the [...]
12Aug
Hidden away betwixt a currency exchange and variety store on the south side of Dundas Square — Toronto’s stab at a European-style piazza — is a hole in the wall that’s one of the few signs of a true public square to be seen at the intersection of Dundas and Babylon. A small chalkboard posts [...]
10Aug
By sheer luck, our family stumbled on a little-known urban success story while looking for a place to crash in Quebec City that offered direct access to the throughway to northern Quebec, where our daughter was going to learn French. Right next to Quebec City’s famous central core, preserved as a walled monument of an [...]
10Aug
Visiting Japan a few years ago changed the way I look at the difference between conventional and nuclear war. On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima became the target for the first atomic bomb dropped on civilian populations, a chilling example of the use of non-conventional weapons. That moment is now commemorated around the world every August. [...]
16Jul
Every time I see a shopper at the checkout counter stuff an armful of food into a purse or briefcase, I’m reminded how far Canadians will stretch themselves to save the five cent tax on plastic bags and do the right thing to cust back on packaging waste. Now we’re being asked to stretch some [...]
The following remarks were delivered by Wayne at a June 29 party of 130 people celebrating his ten years with the Toronto Food Policy Council and Toronto Public Health.
Liz Janzen, the recently retired director of Toronto Public Health, who did so much to champion the Toronto Food Policy Council and many other bold initiatives, offers private lessons on how to avoid humiliating yourself by crying at public gatherings. As a consequence, I am taking the unusual step of reading from prepared notes.
Many people over the years have told me I am finished, but now I get to make the call that one phase of my life is finished. Managing the Toronto Food Policy Council requires an ability to keep a lot of balls in the air, and there comes a time when that gets very hard on the brain, which means it’s time to shift to work that builds on other portions of the brain, some of which may even work better than ever. As men get older, they lose hair on the top of their heads, for example, but more than make up for it by hair gains in their nose, ear and back. And that is my expectation of retirement, or what is more properly called repurposing. More brain, likely in the wrong places. Also, more repurposing than retirement.
I was lucky enough to have a front-row seat on the rise of the modern food movement. While I fully acknowledge that the times and conditions have to be right for social movements to flourish, it seems fitting at this time, after the traumatic divisiveness created by some government organizations around the G8/20 summit, to share the secret family recipe I followed. I think it helped the food policy council and food movement succeed, and I hope it prevails over the competing recipe, which many are pushing in the wake of the summit fiasco.
First, we need to love our city, just like we need to love our neighbor and neighborhoods – not because you think like, or look like, your neighbors, but because “you belong here,” as Toronto’s wonderful slogan has it. We are not about utopia, which is literally no-place. We have to learn to love our place if we are ever to put power in its place.
We need to find our city’s ordinariness lovable. It is an acquired taste, but if you give it time you will find the view of “a city of villages” as magnificent as the views of a city with mountains, ocean beaches and waterfalls. The sheer humbleness of food, not its exquisiteness, makes it such a powerful tool for bringing out the best in people, which is why the section of Toronto’s new food strategy, Cultivating Food Connections, features the growing of food-friendly neighborhoods.
We have to appreciate the level of public service this city brings out, with board of education trustees like Fiona Nelson and Bob Spencer and City Councilors like Gord Perks, Joe Mihevc, Pam McConnell, Janet Davis, Shelley Carroll, Jack Layton and Olivia Chow who have provided real leadership. They are a diverse group, and you won’t find their equal in any other city. We do not join in with the naysayers, the angry cynics or politician bashers. We remain supporters of people in public service who are doing their best: because if you don’t know what to be thankful for, and if you don’t know when a glass is half full rather than half-empty, then you’re not really cut out for food policy and actionism.
We need to admire the commitment to public service by City staff. In 2001 and 2001, when the Food and Hunger Action Committee developed the newly-amalgamated city’s vision of food, we made it a partnership of staff, community groups and councilors and committed ourselves to find a three-way consensus – so we will rise together, not over one another. I am proud to have worked for government as a civil servant committed to civil society, and I believe the public service from the likes of David McKeown, Barbara Emanuel, Carol Timmings, Brian Cook, Peter Dorfman, Yusuf Alam, Mary-Anne McBean, Leslie Toy, Safoura Moazami, Solomon Boye, Julian Hasford, Susan Shepherd, Gaetana Schaefer, Adele Bonofiglio, Agnes Hildebrandt – to name just people who worked on the food strategy or the Keep Wayne Out of Trouble Brigade – deserves citizens’ respect and gratitude.
We must feel passion and fire in the belly, to do this work. But above all, we must bring positive energy, good will and a commitment to workable solutions. When I started here, I had the great fortune to find in a second-hand bookstore a copy of Gandhi’s lecture to the people who would join him to launch the movement for Indian independence from Britain; they later walked across the country to build the boycott against the British salt tax and to rediscover their birthright from the commons — free salt from the ocean. You cannot join unless you love the British and what is best in them, Gandhi said, and I think he insisted on this because he knew you cannot build a liberating movement that is based on anger or hate or divisiveness. Gandhi’s lecture is what allowed me to work here fairly productively and quite happily for ten years.
As a person who never embraced formal religion, I surprised myself late one evening in March 2008, when, at 3:00 in the morning after way too many pots of coffee, I came to write my very last overdue paragraph on my dead-dead deadline for The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food. A phrase I had long mocked popped into my head: Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. I used to think this was about pacifying the poor so they would divert their attention to the next world where they would get pie in the sky when they die. But suddenly, its profound radicalism hit me.
At the most direct level, we work to bring the right of food to all and to ensure that it is shared with children, newcomers, the poor and homeless. But beyond that, we work with food because food is not about human power and triumph and glory, but about our humble animal needs that make us vulnerable and dependent on nature and make us vulnerable and interdependent with one another. That is how we humans are made – other than Vitamin D processed in our skin, our large brains leave no space for body parts that manufacture a wide range of nutrients from a few simple wild grasses and tree leaves; we can only get the nutrients we need from a wide range of foods, all of which come from outside ourselves. And, zenlike, that very need and vulnerability have been the source and inner strength of human achievement, culture and sociability. This baseline of our creation is the reason why I believe that the food movement must be militantly joyful and radically meek – not radical chic, but radical meek.
That is why I asked that the proceeds from tonight go to a baking oven at the historic Montgomery Inn, where many escaped slaves came to work when they took the famous “underground railway” and fled to freedom in Canada. The baking oven celebrates our need for one another and the warm and positive energy we can share when we work together to meet our common needs.
A gift to Montgomery Inn also lets me thank Janice Etter, citizen chair of the Toronto Food Policy Council and of the citizen board overseeing Montgomery Inn. She is the very model of an engaged citizen who donates deep knowledge and caring as well as hard work for good causes. Together, we will keep the fires of baking ovens and other community technologies burning.
Yellowknife and Hay River
“We’re so far behind up here that we’re ahead,” Evellyn Coleman told me, explaining why her Territorial Farmers Association, the first in North America to consider accepting backyard and community gardeners as full members, was inviting me up to speak in the Northwest Territories.
Just south of the Arctic tundra, where lichen and moss are the dominant plants, the prospects of any kind of agriculture or farming in the Northwest Territories seem chilling and forbidding to southerners like me. But for some hardy souls among 40,000 territorial residents, life’s glass of icy water is half-full, not half-empty. The challenge of growing food in forbidding circumstances using mostly solar-powered methods has got them excited.
Seeing what some of these sub-arctic farmers and gardeners can do is not part of the standard epic showing how humans can overcome and conquer Nature. On the contrary, they are learning to be aligned with what Nature provides. Indeed, the limiting factor for food producers in the far north, where food self-reliance was not unlearned until the 1950s, is the colonial and mining heritage focused on high throughput of gold and diamonds in and out of a local economy. The alternative is nurturing an economy that relies mainly on circular flows of goods and services within itself, such as a regionally self-reliant food system.
I believe the lessons of what they’re starting to do up in the far north are relevant for some ten million people across North America living in isolated communities and dependent on imports for basic foods –thereby losing all the economic spin-off benefits that come with a local job-rich food system.
My plane landed in Yellowknife, where France Benoit, a new director of the Territorial Farmers Association, took me to her digs — an off-grid bungalow-sized cabin overlooking Madeline Lake about 25 miles east of the city of 20,000. Benoit has a lot to do that day, but offers me the gift of “Yellowknife time – nothing is so important that it can’t be put off until tomorrow so we can make time to talk today” – the warm and hospitable timekeeping system that keeps many of the NWT’s 20,000 residents loyal to the area.
Benoit’s cabin stands near the western cornerstone of a region of 1.4 million square miles of Taiga Shield, what the Dene people called “the land of little sticks” (Denendeh), and what she calls “boreal forest, Canadian Shield, and rock, rock, rock.” At least there’s no need to truck in materials for rock gardens, I think. But Benoit is even more positive. Thinking about gardening “is like putting new lenses on, looking at your world in a new way,” she says.
She leads me past the sign warning “Trespassers will be composted” to a garage that’s been converted into a greenhouse that operates unheated for eight months a year, growing dainty crops during the summer and giving a headstart in the spring to hardier plants that can be transplanted outdoors from mid-June to mid-September.
Surprisingly, the limiting factor for Benoit is not the short length of the growing season, which is made up for by the length of the growing day in the Land of the Midnight Sun. Over a season, plants enjoy about the same amount of heat and light as they would in the area around the Great Lakes. And because the growing season comes so fast and hard, the Far North is sometimes known as the area of bumper harvests and giant crop specimens.
Benoit’s problem is lack of soil and lack of rain, much needed when days are so long and losses to evaporation are great. Countless lakes can make up for the lack of rain, and a new city program to pilot composting with Ecology North (an organization run by Benoit’s partner) offers the possibility of local soil.
Compost supplies the soil in her greenhouse and outdoor gardens, all “raised beds” which heat up quickly in the spring and provide a flat working space in this hilly terrain.
From what I’m used to in southern Ontario, there’s not much that doesn’t grow here. Outdoors, she has cool-tolerant crops such as cabbage, rhubarb, Brussels sprouts, strawberries, zucchini, cauliflower, beets, bush beans, spinach, onions, bok choy, lettuce, celery and quinoa. In the unheated greenhouse, she has sweet potatoes, chickpeas, peppers and 20 tomato plants hanging upside down from a cylinder. Their roots grow upwards and the plant grows down to make full use of the normally-unused height of the garage, a space efficiency move that goes by the name of vertical agriculture. It’s outside-the-cylinder thinking like this that turns Northwest food challenges upside down and converts them into opportunities.
The life of commercial food producers is easier in Hay River, a few hundred miles south of Yellowknife and a world apart in terms of soil; it’s a cornerstone of Taiga Plains, and has rich soil from flooding of the Hay River.
Floods produce fertility, just like the Nile, says Gene Hachey, who manages the file for traditional economy, agriculture and fisheries in the NWT government. With two student volunteers, he helps out 29 community gardens, many of them in Aboriginal communities. I visited one of them in N’DIlo, near Yellowknife, where community service worker Melissa Doctor has converted an empty lot long used as a dump into a gardening beautification project. Doctor has adapted garden production Aboriginal traditions; the dill is popular with abundant wild trout from Great Slave Lake, and the potatoes and carrots are for stews featuring moose or caribou. There is a smokehouse for preserving fish, as in Aboriginal tradition, at the rear of the garden. “Once the kids try fresh food, there’s no turning back,” Doctor says.
Some of the community gardens across the territories are required to donate a quarter of what they produce to local food banks and women’s shelters.
The leading gardener in Hay River and president of the Territorial Farmers Association is Jackie Milne, who works a plot in the town’s industrial park, as well as her own three acres on the outskirts of town. I talked to her during a break from construction on her unheated greenhouse and forest clearance for livestock adapted to the North – ducks, geese, rabbits, and Icelandic sheep, which thrive on grass and produce wool, milk and meat. Milne makes her living half the year selling into the farmers market in Hay River.
I left the territory convinced that a new breed of farmers and farm leaders — mostly women, it might be noted — is taking the local food challenge to the next level. They’re not only showing how to innovate as producers in a cold climate. They’re showing how farmers in isolated areas can grow self-reliance – what’s sometimes called food sovereignty – as well as new food jobs and tasty fresh foods commonly missing in isolated and single industry towns.
“We can feed ourselves up here,” Milne says. “We just have to convince the government to support food and agriculture as significant activities.”
(adapted from NOW Magazine, August 26- September 1, 2010)
Imitation is the highest form of flattery, and the intricate form of food production practiced by peasants through much of Asia and South America still express that flattery in relation to Nature. In the Global North, all food production except hunting and gathering is commonly referred to as agriculture. But in the Global South, the peasant and Indigenous styles of food production are increasingly called agro-ecology. The trend is coming soon to communities across the Global North, and may fly under the concept of bio-mimicry.
There’s a world of difference in distinct regions of food production and food culture – not just East and West, which shall never meet, as British imperialist Rudyard Kipling defined it for his generation – but, equally important, North and South. Bio-mimicry is second nature in the South, as is its opposite in the North, though the twain may well meet sometime soon, when cheap oil runs out.
The Southern family-farm-based alternative was brought to the attention of a Northern counterculture of food and farming by Miguel Altieri’s 1987 classic Agroecology: The Science of Sustainable Agriculture.
Agriculture comes from the ancient Roman or Latin words for field (ager) and cultivation. But fields are hard to come by in the mountainous and forested regions of Mexico, the Andes or Asia. And the process of getting food from wild and mountainous areas has as much to do with tending, gathering and carrying as with cultivating.
In the absence of colonialism, different geographies nurture different food production strategies, and the difference between North and South can be most easily understood from the number of F words describing what farmers tend to. In the North, Farmers mostly cultivate Food (more commonly Food inputs) on huge Fields of land. A few F’s say most of what Farmers do.
In the South, by contrast, peasant families make some of their living by tending small patches of Field for Food and Fabrics, such as cotton. But much of the time, they’re out in the Forest Foraging for Fodder for their livestock, Fish from a marsh, Fuel for the homefires, Fiber to make building materials for homes, Furniture and Fenceposts, or materials to add Fertility to their ancient soils – not to mention meduicinals and countless toher things they Find. While wild forests were seen as the enemies of agriculture in the North, and cut down to make way for farming, in the South, forests are the mainstay of peasant livelihoods, one reason why agro-ecology methods are often also known as agro-forestry.
The multiple productive uses to which land is put in the South mimic nature in at least two ways. First, perennial plants – mango trees, avocado bushes, and grasses fed to cattle are examples — are dominant, much as they are in nature. Both Nature and agro-ecology figured out how to produce food without disturbing the earth with annual plowing.
Secondly, Southerners plant and tend a very diverse range of plants, again mimicking nature, where diversity is the norm. In Northern farms, by contrast, a small number of cereal grains account for the majority of the food consumed by humans and a limited number of favored livestock.
Lauren Baker, one of the pioneer rooftop gardeners in Canada back in the 1990s and more recently the leader of Sustain Ontario, got to see agroecology up close while completing field research )amazing how these agriculture-based terms such as field research are part of our unconscious thinking) for her 2009 Ph D thesis at Toronto’s York University.
Baker met with leaders of mostly Indigenous small farmers in Michoacan, a state in western Mexico known for butterfly habitat, progressive politics and exports of avocado, mango, guava, lemon and lime. Disappointed by their inability to get higher prices for organic produce, local farmers got together to develop production methods that both lowered their production cost and increased the number of local jobs. Through the Michoacan Agribusiness Center and university research done in active cooperation with farmers, a series of family and coop businesses provided organic fertilizers and pesticides from local materials – worm compost, bat guano, stinging nettle and the like – thereby cutting input costs by 70 per cent while creating local jobs.
Baker says this fits with agroecology because “it relies on looking close to home for solutions” just as natural systems are forced to do. “Nothing is wasted; the waste from one process becomes input for another. The flow of energy and materials is circular, as in nature,” she says. “That’s why it can be described as a food web, rather than a food chain,” a Northern term referring to a one-way linear transportation of material and energy “throughput.”
Some versions of agro-ecology practices are starting to catch on in the North, most notably with the recent interest in “grass-fed” livestock, returning livestock to the natural perennial grasses their ancestors ate before humans fattened them more quickly with annual cereal grains.
Other versions may well follow when high gas and fertilizer (made from natural gas) prices kick in and when widespread drought in areas like the North American West makes grains too expensive to feed to cattle or cars. Foods gathered from perennial plants – nuts, fruit, berries and wild rice, for example – may be in for a comeback, as will fuel, fabrics and fiber based on natural materials instead of fossil fuel-based plastics and synthetics.
Who knows, Northern governments might even subsidize farmers to mimic nature by working their lands to produce ecological services, just as wild meadows and forests of the South provide – habitat for pollinating insects and birds, biological filters (deep root systems of wild grasses, for instance) to clean water, or storage of excess carbon in trees, nature’s way of carbon storage. Instead of paying farmers exclusively for food products from fields, we might supplement their incomes with fees for the products and services of forests, marshes and fields.
Imitating Nature and the Global South — that might be the next generation of agricultural adaptation in the North. In the West and North, the early development of agriculture was associated with prophets who took people out of the wilderness. In the coming era, we need prophets to take us back.
Hidden away betwixt a currency exchange and variety store on the south side of Dundas Square — Toronto’s stab at a European-style piazza — is a hole in the wall that’s one of the few signs of a true public square to be seen at the intersection of Dundas and Babylon.
A small chalkboard posts a daily welcome to Café Oro — 150 square feet of fair trade coffee, custom-made sandwiches, daily soup specials, fruit-filled muffins and made-to-order attitude. No seats necessary; take a bench at the square or go eat at your desk at the public health department, Ryerson University or City TV, all a stone’s throw away.
Like all the hot spots in New York or Tokyo, only people who know where to find it can find it. Drop by, because holes in the wall are the Next New Thing in city economies and community karma.
Creatives trying to find a starter home for their off-the-wall idea are the force behind the new economy trend, says downtown councilor Adam Vaughan, champion and theoretician of the Hole in the Wall Gang. His success at gaining the good will of planners over his last term may well be an omen of the post-industrial and post-recession city economy.
Laurie Mercer, the manager of Café Oro since 2007, is a prototype of the “nano-preneurs” who treat found spaces in cities as if they were specimens of found art that only awaited imagination before being turned into something special.
Like most people in what’s called the “casual” or “informal” economy, Mercer comes to her job long in experience and generic skills, but short on the academic credentials needed to make it in the formal economy. She picked up cooking while helping her mom at home, helping out on a farm, feeding her own kids, watching chefs during gigs as a waiter and wholesale food driver, and eventually a break into professional food prep for the east-end vegan hangout, Pulp Kitchen.
Aside from food-related jobs, Mercer worked for a film company on commercials, which taught her the importance of presentation skills. “I try to hire students in photography or people likely to have a good eye for plating,” she says. “Without that, you’re dead when the food goes on display under glass.”
Making a place like this go, during the rise and fall of customer tides as the rush of breakfast and lunch come and go, also requires staff who are part of the “casual labor market.” Mercer tries to hire students, who get paid $11 an hour, because she wants staff “with something else going on in their lives. People shouldn’t make sandwiches when they’re in a bad mood.”
Sociability compensates for Café Oro’s bush shelter ambience.
“Repeat business is 90 per cent of the trade,” she says. “I know people’s allergies, how much time they have to wait, and can figure what to do when they’re too stressed to choose and ask me to surprise them with something nice, and know when to suggest my tea with ginger to fight a cold. Nothing beats the pride of a business owner who produces something that nurtures.”
What makes these kinds of places a matter for public policy?
I like the fact that Café Oro offers wages and hours that allow approximately three people at a time to work their way through university. That’s a public benefit, over and above what one buyer and one seller get in a business exchange. I also think it adds public health value to have an earn-while-you-learn type of workplace that spreads lifelong life skills in cooking from scratch, something few people learn at home or school. To boot, any place that can create 3.5 fulltime job equivalents out of $500 a day worth of soup, muffins, sandwiches and coffee knows something about low-cost job creation that governments should learn from.
Councillor Vaughan sees small shops as part of a much larger trend which cities need to get behind, as is done in Melbourne, Australia. “New ideas need small places,” he says, where artists, newcomers and do-it-yourselfers can “take a run at it,” without having to pay high rents and, even more burdensome, high property taxes – the deadly combination of which makes it impossible for anyone but high-volume/ fast cashflow operators.
“It turns out that the very thing that characterizes healthy neighbourhoods is independent and unique businesses that thrive in small places,” Vaughan says. A recent fire at the buildings centred around Duke’s cycle shop on Queen West revealed that eight small stores hired 108 workers, he says. There’s a rabbit warren of job creation hidden away places too small for most politicians to look at.
Vaughan worries that developers have a formula for ground-floor shopping spaces designed for major outlets, a one-size-fits-all prescription that squeezes out newcomers and innovators and gives the prime spaces to chains – not exactly a prescription for downtown vitality.
Over his term in office, he’s worked with City planners and community groups to foster 20,000 square feet of small openings for artists, food stores (which he classifies as culinary art) and bike shops in his downtown ward. He’d like to see the practice spread to suburban areas.
Toronto needs to return to its history as a city of shopkeepers, says Vaughan. He supports policies that permit holes in the wall and encourage provision of not-for-profit commercial rentals. He also favors a progressive taxation policy for small, individual- or family-owned businesses that can’t pay the same property tax in their rent as big corporations any more than they can pay the same income tax as their owners.”This is no different from other postponements of regular taxes and levies to lure major corporations to locate in the city,” he says Why not share the incewntives with small retailers of our own?
Conventional cities of the industrial era rolled out an economy with four wheels. The four wheels made full employment go ’round — a strong for-profit sector of corporate heavyweights, a robust government sector of teachers, healthworkers and civil servants, a vibrant voluntary sector of charities and non-profits (the “social economy”), and a diverse sector of small, mostly service-based, main street shops.
Once private sector jobs were outsourced to the Global South and after the shakedown following the 2008 stockmarket crash, a fifth wheel – basically adapted from poor countries in the Global South or reinvented from earlier stages of industrialism – has been discovered. It’s called the “casual” or “informal” economy. That means artists struggling for a commercial break, part-timers who need to supplement their major gig as students, retirees, parents, caregivers, and artisans who don’t like working for a boss.
There is no reason why this informal sector of the emerging knowledge economy should be poorly-paid or treated. In the early days of industrialism, for example, “journeymen” artisans who travelled and worked by the day were among the best-paid and most respected of workers, and the backbone of the early labor movement. There are many reasons why these self-starters should have a space of their own.
In the treasure hunt for new neighbourhood-based jobs, precious things still come in small packages.
By sheer luck, our family stumbled on a little-known urban success story while looking for a place to crash in Quebec City that offered direct access to the throughway to northern Quebec, where our daughter was going to learn French.
Right next to Quebec City’s famous central core, preserved as a walled monument of an old world French fortress city of the 1700s, the past snuggles up to the future arising from the former slums of the Saint Roch quarter below the hilled fortress, where generations of factory workers lived until their industries crashed during the 1980s and ‘90s.
I’ve long felt that Quebec deserves to be known as one of the world’s best examples of an oppressed minority – commonly referred to as “pepsi’s” and “French Niggers of North America” as recently as the 1960s – who’ve made it economically while enriching their traditional culture and distinctive identity. My chance overnight stay gave me a glimpse of the secret formula behind this success. Ironically, it’s very close to the strategy proposed in Jeb Brugmannn’s recent book, Welcome to the Urban Revolution, arguably one of the most important studies of city possibilities since Jane Jacobs.
Those running as or voting for candidates in municipal elections across Ontario this fall might want to consider ways of translating Quebec’s success here.
Dog-tired and worried about the high cost of rooms in the height of Quebec’s summer tourism, we dragged ourselves into the reception area of a hotel called L’Autre Jardin Auberge, the Other Garden Inn. The first thing we saw was a wooden sculpture from Africa. The second thing we saw was a fair trade gift store, Boutique EquiMonde. Then we saw a sign describing the place as Quebec’s first “social economy” hotel. The hotel, launched in 1996, is the money-making arm of a Quebec charity, Carrefour Tiers-Monde (Third World Meeting Place), devoted to education for children’s rights and international solidarity and to the economic revival of the surrounding neighbourhood.
All 28 rooms boasted fair trade towels and rugs, eco-certified writing pads, and nighttime reading booklets on sustainable tourism and responsible shopping. The breakfast nook featured organic and fair trade foods. We knew that at least we would sleep and rise with a clear conscience.
Our early morning walk showed we were in the midst of more than a socially conscious rooming district.
The other garden referred to in the hotel’s name was a block away, where a campus of the University of Quebec abutted the commercial district, serving as a meeting place where students, a few homeless people and other wanderers could share a quiet and green space dominated by a tiny waterfall. This was the project that launched the renewal of this down-on-the-heels district in 1992.
I’ve always had a soft spot for Quebec’s vie en rose approach to life, but where else in North America would we see an urban renewal project inspired by a public garden, la ville en rose, I asked myself.
With one notable set of exceptions, the nearby shopping area along St Joseph Street features the usual suspects of areas undergoing gentrification. Cultural creatives from across North America would be comfortable here. There are artisanal brew pubs and icecream shops, intimate coffee shops and restaurants repurposed from unlikely storefronts (one was a former garage), one-of-a-kind furniture and gift stores, an artist co-op, art school and bike store.
Food specialty shops are the city equivalent of the pioneer species that burst forth after an area has been ravaged by a forest fire. But very quickly, signs crop up that this is more than a unique shopping experience based on the delightfully spontaneous jumble of cultural creative-and counter culture-inspired hangouts.
A huge church, as was standard in Old Quebec, is at the centre of the street scene. Nearby is a public library that shares a section of the street with a low-end eatery, a budget hotel, regional headquarters for a credit union and trade union. A block away is a provincial office of the ministry of tourism and a large Mountain Equipment Co-op store. Since 2000, the entire street has been pedestrianized, given over to those who jaunt through neighbourhood at a walker’s pace.
Almost all the housing in the area comes from Quebec’s iconic balconied triplexes, a mainstay of dense and affordable communities. A typical triplex has one floor for the, who pays a major portion of the mortgage with rental from two triplex tenants, thereby allowing working people to afford to buy handymen’s specials while providing tenants with low rents.
What we see here is a distinctive culture of collaboration, not just a distinctive language group. In Quebec, which has pulled itself up by the bootstraps, people from many walks of life and all levels of government have learned to work together. In French, it’s called “concertation.” It doesn’t cost more. It’s about leverage from partnerships, not money.
With concertation, all assets of a society are put together to see what kind of whole will emerge that is bigger than the parts. What if unions and co-ops — including the mighty Desjardins credit union, with over $150 billion in assets and some$60 million a year donated to community projects – join up with libraries, tourism offices, and city planners to see what a strategy could do for a city? The staff alone from these offices can keep a score of restaurants alive, for example. And the social economy-private economy-public sector economy-informal economy mix provides the ten destinations necessary for any up-and-coming hopping public space, according to the New York-based Project for Public Spaces.
Quebec’s traditions lend themselves to what urban expert Jeb Brugmann calls the Strategic City. It’s the antidote to the “crisis city,” torn apart by a two-way conflict that destroys both sides. It’s also the counterpoint to the “opportunity city,” where a jumble of creatives can’t break through to win support from political or economic power brokers. Brugmann, who lives in Toronto, doesn’t miss the chance to describe his adopted as the epitome of an opportunity city.
By contrast, this Quebec City project fits Brugmann’s code to a T. “When mutually supportive activities are located in proximity,” he writes, “their concentration has a further synergistic effect.” He argues that “one of the most basic and least practiced arts of city building today is the creative use of density –proximity and concentration – in the city’s built form.”
Maybe one municipal candidate will learn this language.
Visiting Japan a few years ago changed the way I look at the difference between conventional and nuclear war.
On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima became the target for the first atomic bomb dropped on civilian populations, a chilling example of the use of non-conventional weapons. That moment is now commemorated around the world every August.
But when I saw Hisoshima, it was a bright and bustling place, and the only obvious sign of a catastrophic past was the absence of anything from the period before 1945 – save for one beautiful tree left unharmed and the smashed and twisted relic of one building, the only rubble kept as a memento.
After a day’s numbing tour of the peace memorial and another day touring the newly-sprouted city, I returned to Tokyo. One of the world’s five most powerful cities, Tokyo stands alone among the world’s great cities for having no significant signs of human habitation from before 1945. That city had been bombed “back into the stone age,” by conventional planes dropping conventional firebombs.
This reality is worth noting when the world is spending more on military tools than ever before, much of that for conventional weapons. That’s why, for example, August commemorations of Hiroshima need to reflect on recent Canadian decisions to spend $18 billion on conventional military tools – based on a tally of new fighter planes, the contract for maintaining them, as well as two new naval ships costing a mere $2.6 billion. I worry that people, even critics, don’t get it.
To date, most commentators on the arms deal controversy have criticized the proposed purchasing contract. It’s been called a “boondoggle” because one of the largest purchasing contracts in Canadian history will be awarded solely to one U.S corporate giant, Lockheed Martin, without benefit of a competitive bid subject to public oversight or input. The House of Commons defence committee has not even been convened. The lack of governance smells bad in an age when transparency is seen as essential to democracy; a retired assistant deputy minister of defence has publicly protested this.
The military logic, if there is such a thing, also comes up wanting, say most commentators. Why a one-engine plane, instead of a more resilient model with two engines? Why a “flying Cadillac” that can’t fly very far without refueling, making it difficult to service protection of Canadian sovereignty or conduct search and rescue in the Arctic? Why are these planes so similar to the stealth planes recently bought by the U.S. military, when Canada has rarely mounted surprise attacks of aggression?
Because of the impact my visits to Hiroshima and Tokyo had on me, I’d like to explore this deal from a different angle. I want to figure out why, two decades after the cold war ended and a period of some dampening of nuclear overkill capability, governments of all types and sizes are spending more than ever on tools of war.
According to research by the well-respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), world military expenditures in 2009 topped $1.5 trillion. That’s more than the total income of half the world’s population, about 2.4 per cent of the world’s total economic expenditures, or about $217 for each person in the world today – enough to solve at least one major problem such as hunger every year.
Two-thirds of that war money is spent by the same Big 5 world powers who sit on the United Nations security council, and who are formally responsible for world collective security (aka world peace), as well as the UN’s millennial commitments to end poverty, hunger and discrimination.
U.S. spending accounts for 46 per cent of global spending on war tools. The UN’s entire budget amounts to 1.8 per cent of weapons spending.
Long ago, in the period after the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin Wall fell, there was talk of a “peace dividend” – of money freed up from military purposes and made available for human development, not destruction. Indeed, there was a significant decline in military spending during the 1990s – from $1.2 trillion in 1985 to 809 billion in 1998. Then along came the terrorist threat – a threat quite different from that posed by competing national governments, usually fought out during wars. But that’s when budgets to fight enemy governments soared – up 48 per cent relative to 2000. The U.S. alone spends 44 times more on weapons than all six governments labeled as rogue states;
Though people like me, who promote food-based economic development strategies, like to brag that demand for food is recession-proof, I have to admit that the sources of life are nowhere near as recession-proof as the sources of death. In 2009, a year before G20 nations decided it was time to clamp down on government spending to stimulate economic recovery, 16 members of the elite club spent more on weapons than the year before.
Oddly enough, few analysts of the global economic recession attribute any damage to world economies wrought by this expenditure on materials that create no social, health, community or other value and very few jobs – compared to what that money would yield if invested in food and shelter, both labor-intensive sectors. But prisons and armies – what some economists call military and gulag Keynesianism – always get to the front of the line.
By global standards for wealthy nations, Canada remains a bit player. As a bit player, Canada spends about 19 billion a year on the military, or about 1.3 per cent of the GNP. That doesn’t affect the world balance of terror, just the misbalancing of priorities. As the late Tommy Douglas (founder of Canada’s medicare system, among other accomplishments) used to say, the US has hawks and doves; but Canadian governments are always parrots.
The following remarks were delivered by Wayne at a June 29 party of 130 people celebrating his ten years with the Toronto Food Policy Council and Toronto Public Health.
Liz Janzen, the recently retired director of Toronto Public Health, who did so much to champion the Toronto Food Policy Council and many other bold initiatives, offers private lessons on how to avoid humiliating yourself by crying at public gatherings. As a consequence, I am taking the unusual step of reading from prepared notes.
Many people over the years have told me I am finished, but now I get to make the call that one phase of my life is finished. Managing the Toronto Food Policy Council requires an ability to keep a lot of balls in the air, and there comes a time when that gets very hard on the brain, which means it’s time to shift to work that builds on other portions of the brain, some of which may even work better than ever. As men get older, they lose hair on the top of their heads, for example, but more than make up for it by hair gains in their nose, ear and back. And that is my expectation of retirement, or what is more properly called repurposing. More brain, likely in the wrong places. Also, more repurposing than retirement.
I was lucky enough to have a front-row seat on the rise of the modern food movement. While I fully acknowledge that the times and conditions have to be right for social movements to flourish, it seems fitting at this time, after the traumatic divisiveness created by some government organizations around the G8/20 summit, to share the secret family recipe I followed. I think it helped the food policy council and food movement succeed, and I hope it prevails over the competing recipe, which many are pushing in the wake of the summit fiasco.
First, we need to love our city, just like we need to love our neighbor and neighborhoods – not because you think like, or look like, your neighbors, but because “you belong here,” as Toronto’s wonderful slogan has it. We are not about utopia, which is literally no-place. We have to learn to love our place if we are ever to put power in its place.
We need to find our city’s ordinariness lovable. It is an acquired taste, but if you give it time you will find the view of “a city of villages” as magnificent as the views of a city with mountains, ocean beaches and waterfalls. The sheer humbleness of food, not its exquisiteness, makes it such a powerful tool for bringing out the best in people, which is why the section of Toronto’s new food strategy, Cultivating Food Connections, features the growing of food-friendly neighborhoods.
We have to appreciate the level of public service this city brings out, with board of education trustees like Fiona Nelson and Bob Spencer and City Councilors like Gord Perks, Joe Mihevc, Pam McConnell, Janet Davis, Shelley Carroll, Jack Layton and Olivia Chow who have provided real leadership. They are a diverse group, and you won’t find their equal in any other city. We do not join in with the naysayers, the angry cynics or politician bashers. We remain supporters of people in public service who are doing their best: because if you don’t know what to be thankful for, and if you don’t know when a glass is half full rather than half-empty, then you’re not really cut out for food policy and actionism.
We need to admire the commitment to public service by City staff. In 2001 and 2001, when the Food and Hunger Action Committee developed the newly-amalgamated city’s vision of food, we made it a partnership of staff, community groups and councilors and committed ourselves to find a three-way consensus – so we will rise together, not over one another. I am proud to have worked for government as a civil servant committed to civil society, and I believe the public service from the likes of David McKeown, Barbara Emanuel, Carol Timmings, Brian Cook, Peter Dorfman, Yusuf Alam, Mary-Anne McBean, Leslie Toy, Safoura Moazami, Solomon Boye, Julian Hasford, Susan Shepherd, Gaetana Schaefer, Adele Bonofiglio, Agnes Hildebrandt – to name just people who worked on the food strategy or the Keep Wayne Out of Trouble Brigade – deserves citizens’ respect and gratitude.
We must feel passion and fire in the belly, to do this work. But above all, we must bring positive energy, good will and a commitment to workable solutions. When I started here, I had the great fortune to find in a second-hand bookstore a copy of Gandhi’s lecture to the people who would join him to launch the movement for Indian independence from Britain; they later walked across the country to build the boycott against the British salt tax and to rediscover their birthright from the commons — free salt from the ocean. You cannot join unless you love the British and what is best in them, Gandhi said, and I think he insisted on this because he knew you cannot build a liberating movement that is based on anger or hate or divisiveness. Gandhi’s lecture is what allowed me to work here fairly productively and quite happily for ten years.
As a person who never embraced formal religion, I surprised myself late one evening in March 2008, when, at 3:00 in the morning after way too many pots of coffee, I came to write my very last overdue paragraph on my dead-dead deadline for The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food. A phrase I had long mocked popped into my head: Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. I used to think this was about pacifying the poor so they would divert their attention to the next world where they would get pie in the sky when they die. But suddenly, its profound radicalism hit me.
At the most direct level, we work to bring the right of food to all and to ensure that it is shared with children, newcomers, the poor and homeless. But beyond that, we work with food because food is not about human power and triumph and glory, but about our humble animal needs that make us vulnerable and dependent on nature and make us vulnerable and interdependent with one another. That is how we humans are made – other than Vitamin D processed in our skin, our large brains leave no space for body parts that manufacture a wide range of nutrients from a few simple wild grasses and tree leaves; we can only get the nutrients we need from a wide range of foods, all of which come from outside ourselves. And, zenlike, that very need and vulnerability have been the source and inner strength of human achievement, culture and sociability. This baseline of our creation is the reason why I believe that the food movement must be militantly joyful and radically meek – not radical chic, but radical meek.
That is why I asked that the proceeds from tonight go to a baking oven at the historic Montgomery Inn, where many escaped slaves came to work when they took the famous “underground railway” and fled to freedom in Canada. The baking oven celebrates our need for one another and the warm and positive energy we can share when we work together to meet our common needs.
A gift to Montgomery Inn also lets me thank Janice Etter, citizen chair of the Toronto Food Policy Council and of the citizen board overseeing Montgomery Inn. She is the very model of an engaged citizen who donates deep knowledge and caring as well as hard work for good causes. Together, we will keep the fires of baking ovens and other community technologies burning.
Yellowknife and Hay River
“We’re so far behind up here that we’re ahead,” Evellyn Coleman told me, explaining why her Territorial Farmers Association, the first in North America to consider accepting backyard and community gardeners as full members, was inviting me up to speak in the Northwest Territories.
Just south of the Arctic tundra, where lichen and moss are the dominant plants, the prospects of any kind of agriculture or farming in the Northwest Territories seem chilling and forbidding to southerners like me. But for some hardy souls among 40,000 territorial residents, life’s glass of icy water is half-full, not half-empty. The challenge of growing food in forbidding circumstances using mostly solar-powered methods has got them excited.
Seeing what some of these sub-arctic farmers and gardeners can do is not part of the standard epic showing how humans can overcome and conquer Nature. On the contrary, they are learning to be aligned with what Nature provides. Indeed, the limiting factor for food producers in the far north, where food self-reliance was not unlearned until the 1950s, is the colonial and mining heritage focused on high throughput of gold and diamonds in and out of a local economy. The alternative is nurturing an economy that relies mainly on circular flows of goods and services within itself, such as a regionally self-reliant food system.
I believe the lessons of what they’re starting to do up in the far north are relevant for some ten million people across North America living in isolated communities and dependent on imports for basic foods –thereby losing all the economic spin-off benefits that come with a local job-rich food system.
My plane landed in Yellowknife, where France Benoit, a new director of the Territorial Farmers Association, took me to her digs — an off-grid bungalow-sized cabin overlooking Madeline Lake about 25 miles east of the city of 20,000. Benoit has a lot to do that day, but offers me the gift of “Yellowknife time – nothing is so important that it can’t be put off until tomorrow so we can make time to talk today” – the warm and hospitable timekeeping system that keeps many of the NWT’s 20,000 residents loyal to the area.
Benoit’s cabin stands near the western cornerstone of a region of 1.4 million square miles of Taiga Shield, what the Dene people called “the land of little sticks” (Denendeh), and what she calls “boreal forest, Canadian Shield, and rock, rock, rock.” At least there’s no need to truck in materials for rock gardens, I think. But Benoit is even more positive. Thinking about gardening “is like putting new lenses on, looking at your world in a new way,” she says.
She leads me past the sign warning “Trespassers will be composted” to a garage that’s been converted into a greenhouse that operates unheated for eight months a year, growing dainty crops during the summer and giving a headstart in the spring to hardier plants that can be transplanted outdoors from mid-June to mid-September.
Surprisingly, the limiting factor for Benoit is not the short length of the growing season, which is made up for by the length of the growing day in the Land of the Midnight Sun. Over a season, plants enjoy about the same amount of heat and light as they would in the area around the Great Lakes. And because the growing season comes so fast and hard, the Far North is sometimes known as the area of bumper harvests and giant crop specimens.
Benoit’s problem is lack of soil and lack of rain, much needed when days are so long and losses to evaporation are great. Countless lakes can make up for the lack of rain, and a new city program to pilot composting with Ecology North (an organization run by Benoit’s partner) offers the possibility of local soil.
Compost supplies the soil in her greenhouse and outdoor gardens, all “raised beds” which heat up quickly in the spring and provide a flat working space in this hilly terrain.
From what I’m used to in southern Ontario, there’s not much that doesn’t grow here. Outdoors, she has cool-tolerant crops such as cabbage, rhubarb, Brussels sprouts, strawberries, zucchini, cauliflower, beets, bush beans, spinach, onions, bok choy, lettuce, celery and quinoa. In the unheated greenhouse, she has sweet potatoes, chickpeas, peppers and 20 tomato plants hanging upside down from a cylinder. Their roots grow upwards and the plant grows down to make full use of the normally-unused height of the garage, a space efficiency move that goes by the name of vertical agriculture. It’s outside-the-cylinder thinking like this that turns Northwest food challenges upside down and converts them into opportunities.
The life of commercial food producers is easier in Hay River, a few hundred miles south of Yellowknife and a world apart in terms of soil; it’s a cornerstone of Taiga Plains, and has rich soil from flooding of the Hay River.
Floods produce fertility, just like the Nile, says Gene Hachey, who manages the file for traditional economy, agriculture and fisheries in the NWT government. With two student volunteers, he helps out 29 community gardens, many of them in Aboriginal communities. I visited one of them in N’DIlo, near Yellowknife, where community service worker Melissa Doctor has converted an empty lot long used as a dump into a gardening beautification project. Doctor has adapted garden production Aboriginal traditions; the dill is popular with abundant wild trout from Great Slave Lake, and the potatoes and carrots are for stews featuring moose or caribou. There is a smokehouse for preserving fish, as in Aboriginal tradition, at the rear of the garden. “Once the kids try fresh food, there’s no turning back,” Doctor says.
Some of the community gardens across the territories are required to donate a quarter of what they produce to local food banks and women’s shelters.
The leading gardener in Hay River and president of the Territorial Farmers Association is Jackie Milne, who works a plot in the town’s industrial park, as well as her own three acres on the outskirts of town. I talked to her during a break from construction on her unheated greenhouse and forest clearance for livestock adapted to the North – ducks, geese, rabbits, and Icelandic sheep, which thrive on grass and produce wool, milk and meat. Milne makes her living half the year selling into the farmers market in Hay River.
I left the territory convinced that a new breed of farmers and farm leaders — mostly women, it might be noted — is taking the local food challenge to the next level. They’re not only showing how to innovate as producers in a cold climate. They’re showing how farmers in isolated areas can grow self-reliance – what’s sometimes called food sovereignty – as well as new food jobs and tasty fresh foods commonly missing in isolated and single industry towns.
“We can feed ourselves up here,” Milne says. “We just have to convince the government to support food and agriculture as significant activities.”
(adapted from NOW Magazine, August 26- September 1, 2010)
Imitation is the highest form of flattery, and the intricate form of food production practiced by peasants through much of Asia and South America still express that flattery in relation to Nature. In the Global North, all food production except hunting and gathering is commonly referred to as agriculture. But in the Global South, the peasant and Indigenous styles of food production are increasingly called agro-ecology. The trend is coming soon to communities across the Global North, and may fly under the concept of bio-mimicry.
There’s a world of difference in distinct regions of food production and food culture – not just East and West, which shall never meet, as British imperialist Rudyard Kipling defined it for his generation – but, equally important, North and South. Bio-mimicry is second nature in the South, as is its opposite in the North, though the twain may well meet sometime soon, when cheap oil runs out.
The Southern family-farm-based alternative was brought to the attention of a Northern counterculture of food and farming by Miguel Altieri’s 1987 classic Agroecology: The Science of Sustainable Agriculture.
Agriculture comes from the ancient Roman or Latin words for field (ager) and cultivation. But fields are hard to come by in the mountainous and forested regions of Mexico, the Andes or Asia. And the process of getting food from wild and mountainous areas has as much to do with tending, gathering and carrying as with cultivating.
In the absence of colonialism, different geographies nurture different food production strategies, and the difference between North and South can be most easily understood from the number of F words describing what farmers tend to. In the North, Farmers mostly cultivate Food (more commonly Food inputs) on huge Fields of land. A few F’s say most of what Farmers do.
In the South, by contrast, peasant families make some of their living by tending small patches of Field for Food and Fabrics, such as cotton. But much of the time, they’re out in the Forest Foraging for Fodder for their livestock, Fish from a marsh, Fuel for the homefires, Fiber to make building materials for homes, Furniture and Fenceposts, or materials to add Fertility to their ancient soils – not to mention meduicinals and countless toher things they Find. While wild forests were seen as the enemies of agriculture in the North, and cut down to make way for farming, in the South, forests are the mainstay of peasant livelihoods, one reason why agro-ecology methods are often also known as agro-forestry.
The multiple productive uses to which land is put in the South mimic nature in at least two ways. First, perennial plants – mango trees, avocado bushes, and grasses fed to cattle are examples — are dominant, much as they are in nature. Both Nature and agro-ecology figured out how to produce food without disturbing the earth with annual plowing.
Secondly, Southerners plant and tend a very diverse range of plants, again mimicking nature, where diversity is the norm. In Northern farms, by contrast, a small number of cereal grains account for the majority of the food consumed by humans and a limited number of favored livestock.
Lauren Baker, one of the pioneer rooftop gardeners in Canada back in the 1990s and more recently the leader of Sustain Ontario, got to see agroecology up close while completing field research )amazing how these agriculture-based terms such as field research are part of our unconscious thinking) for her 2009 Ph D thesis at Toronto’s York University.
Baker met with leaders of mostly Indigenous small farmers in Michoacan, a state in western Mexico known for butterfly habitat, progressive politics and exports of avocado, mango, guava, lemon and lime. Disappointed by their inability to get higher prices for organic produce, local farmers got together to develop production methods that both lowered their production cost and increased the number of local jobs. Through the Michoacan Agribusiness Center and university research done in active cooperation with farmers, a series of family and coop businesses provided organic fertilizers and pesticides from local materials – worm compost, bat guano, stinging nettle and the like – thereby cutting input costs by 70 per cent while creating local jobs.
Baker says this fits with agroecology because “it relies on looking close to home for solutions” just as natural systems are forced to do. “Nothing is wasted; the waste from one process becomes input for another. The flow of energy and materials is circular, as in nature,” she says. “That’s why it can be described as a food web, rather than a food chain,” a Northern term referring to a one-way linear transportation of material and energy “throughput.”
Some versions of agro-ecology practices are starting to catch on in the North, most notably with the recent interest in “grass-fed” livestock, returning livestock to the natural perennial grasses their ancestors ate before humans fattened them more quickly with annual cereal grains.
Other versions may well follow when high gas and fertilizer (made from natural gas) prices kick in and when widespread drought in areas like the North American West makes grains too expensive to feed to cattle or cars. Foods gathered from perennial plants – nuts, fruit, berries and wild rice, for example – may be in for a comeback, as will fuel, fabrics and fiber based on natural materials instead of fossil fuel-based plastics and synthetics.
Who knows, Northern governments might even subsidize farmers to mimic nature by working their lands to produce ecological services, just as wild meadows and forests of the South provide – habitat for pollinating insects and birds, biological filters (deep root systems of wild grasses, for instance) to clean water, or storage of excess carbon in trees, nature’s way of carbon storage. Instead of paying farmers exclusively for food products from fields, we might supplement their incomes with fees for the products and services of forests, marshes and fields.
Imitating Nature and the Global South — that might be the next generation of agricultural adaptation in the North. In the West and North, the early development of agriculture was associated with prophets who took people out of the wilderness. In the coming era, we need prophets to take us back.
Hidden away betwixt a currency exchange and variety store on the south side of Dundas Square — Toronto’s stab at a European-style piazza — is a hole in the wall that’s one of the few signs of a true public square to be seen at the intersection of Dundas and Babylon.
A small chalkboard posts a daily welcome to Café Oro — 150 square feet of fair trade coffee, custom-made sandwiches, daily soup specials, fruit-filled muffins and made-to-order attitude. No seats necessary; take a bench at the square or go eat at your desk at the public health department, Ryerson University or City TV, all a stone’s throw away.
Like all the hot spots in New York or Tokyo, only people who know where to find it can find it. Drop by, because holes in the wall are the Next New Thing in city economies and community karma.
Creatives trying to find a starter home for their off-the-wall idea are the force behind the new economy trend, says downtown councilor Adam Vaughan, champion and theoretician of the Hole in the Wall Gang. His success at gaining the good will of planners over his last term may well be an omen of the post-industrial and post-recession city economy.
Laurie Mercer, the manager of Café Oro since 2007, is a prototype of the “nano-preneurs” who treat found spaces in cities as if they were specimens of found art that only awaited imagination before being turned into something special.
Like most people in what’s called the “casual” or “informal” economy, Mercer comes to her job long in experience and generic skills, but short on the academic credentials needed to make it in the formal economy. She picked up cooking while helping her mom at home, helping out on a farm, feeding her own kids, watching chefs during gigs as a waiter and wholesale food driver, and eventually a break into professional food prep for the east-end vegan hangout, Pulp Kitchen.
Aside from food-related jobs, Mercer worked for a film company on commercials, which taught her the importance of presentation skills. “I try to hire students in photography or people likely to have a good eye for plating,” she says. “Without that, you’re dead when the food goes on display under glass.”
Making a place like this go, during the rise and fall of customer tides as the rush of breakfast and lunch come and go, also requires staff who are part of the “casual labor market.” Mercer tries to hire students, who get paid $11 an hour, because she wants staff “with something else going on in their lives. People shouldn’t make sandwiches when they’re in a bad mood.”
Sociability compensates for Café Oro’s bush shelter ambience.
“Repeat business is 90 per cent of the trade,” she says. “I know people’s allergies, how much time they have to wait, and can figure what to do when they’re too stressed to choose and ask me to surprise them with something nice, and know when to suggest my tea with ginger to fight a cold. Nothing beats the pride of a business owner who produces something that nurtures.”
What makes these kinds of places a matter for public policy?
I like the fact that Café Oro offers wages and hours that allow approximately three people at a time to work their way through university. That’s a public benefit, over and above what one buyer and one seller get in a business exchange. I also think it adds public health value to have an earn-while-you-learn type of workplace that spreads lifelong life skills in cooking from scratch, something few people learn at home or school. To boot, any place that can create 3.5 fulltime job equivalents out of $500 a day worth of soup, muffins, sandwiches and coffee knows something about low-cost job creation that governments should learn from.
Councillor Vaughan sees small shops as part of a much larger trend which cities need to get behind, as is done in Melbourne, Australia. “New ideas need small places,” he says, where artists, newcomers and do-it-yourselfers can “take a run at it,” without having to pay high rents and, even more burdensome, high property taxes – the deadly combination of which makes it impossible for anyone but high-volume/ fast cashflow operators.
“It turns out that the very thing that characterizes healthy neighbourhoods is independent and unique businesses that thrive in small places,” Vaughan says. A recent fire at the buildings centred around Duke’s cycle shop on Queen West revealed that eight small stores hired 108 workers, he says. There’s a rabbit warren of job creation hidden away places too small for most politicians to look at.
Vaughan worries that developers have a formula for ground-floor shopping spaces designed for major outlets, a one-size-fits-all prescription that squeezes out newcomers and innovators and gives the prime spaces to chains – not exactly a prescription for downtown vitality.
Over his term in office, he’s worked with City planners and community groups to foster 20,000 square feet of small openings for artists, food stores (which he classifies as culinary art) and bike shops in his downtown ward. He’d like to see the practice spread to suburban areas.
Toronto needs to return to its history as a city of shopkeepers, says Vaughan. He supports policies that permit holes in the wall and encourage provision of not-for-profit commercial rentals. He also favors a progressive taxation policy for small, individual- or family-owned businesses that can’t pay the same property tax in their rent as big corporations any more than they can pay the same income tax as their owners.”This is no different from other postponements of regular taxes and levies to lure major corporations to locate in the city,” he says Why not share the incewntives with small retailers of our own?
Conventional cities of the industrial era rolled out an economy with four wheels. The four wheels made full employment go ’round — a strong for-profit sector of corporate heavyweights, a robust government sector of teachers, healthworkers and civil servants, a vibrant voluntary sector of charities and non-profits (the “social economy”), and a diverse sector of small, mostly service-based, main street shops.
Once private sector jobs were outsourced to the Global South and after the shakedown following the 2008 stockmarket crash, a fifth wheel – basically adapted from poor countries in the Global South or reinvented from earlier stages of industrialism – has been discovered. It’s called the “casual” or “informal” economy. That means artists struggling for a commercial break, part-timers who need to supplement their major gig as students, retirees, parents, caregivers, and artisans who don’t like working for a boss.
There is no reason why this informal sector of the emerging knowledge economy should be poorly-paid or treated. In the early days of industrialism, for example, “journeymen” artisans who travelled and worked by the day were among the best-paid and most respected of workers, and the backbone of the early labor movement. There are many reasons why these self-starters should have a space of their own.
In the treasure hunt for new neighbourhood-based jobs, precious things still come in small packages.
By sheer luck, our family stumbled on a little-known urban success story while looking for a place to crash in Quebec City that offered direct access to the throughway to northern Quebec, where our daughter was going to learn French.
Right next to Quebec City’s famous central core, preserved as a walled monument of an old world French fortress city of the 1700s, the past snuggles up to the future arising from the former slums of the Saint Roch quarter below the hilled fortress, where generations of factory workers lived until their industries crashed during the 1980s and ‘90s.
I’ve long felt that Quebec deserves to be known as one of the world’s best examples of an oppressed minority – commonly referred to as “pepsi’s” and “French Niggers of North America” as recently as the 1960s – who’ve made it economically while enriching their traditional culture and distinctive identity. My chance overnight stay gave me a glimpse of the secret formula behind this success. Ironically, it’s very close to the strategy proposed in Jeb Brugmannn’s recent book, Welcome to the Urban Revolution, arguably one of the most important studies of city possibilities since Jane Jacobs.
Those running as or voting for candidates in municipal elections across Ontario this fall might want to consider ways of translating Quebec’s success here.
Dog-tired and worried about the high cost of rooms in the height of Quebec’s summer tourism, we dragged ourselves into the reception area of a hotel called L’Autre Jardin Auberge, the Other Garden Inn. The first thing we saw was a wooden sculpture from Africa. The second thing we saw was a fair trade gift store, Boutique EquiMonde. Then we saw a sign describing the place as Quebec’s first “social economy” hotel. The hotel, launched in 1996, is the money-making arm of a Quebec charity, Carrefour Tiers-Monde (Third World Meeting Place), devoted to education for children’s rights and international solidarity and to the economic revival of the surrounding neighbourhood.
All 28 rooms boasted fair trade towels and rugs, eco-certified writing pads, and nighttime reading booklets on sustainable tourism and responsible shopping. The breakfast nook featured organic and fair trade foods. We knew that at least we would sleep and rise with a clear conscience.
Our early morning walk showed we were in the midst of more than a socially conscious rooming district.
The other garden referred to in the hotel’s name was a block away, where a campus of the University of Quebec abutted the commercial district, serving as a meeting place where students, a few homeless people and other wanderers could share a quiet and green space dominated by a tiny waterfall. This was the project that launched the renewal of this down-on-the-heels district in 1992.
I’ve always had a soft spot for Quebec’s vie en rose approach to life, but where else in North America would we see an urban renewal project inspired by a public garden, la ville en rose, I asked myself.
With one notable set of exceptions, the nearby shopping area along St Joseph Street features the usual suspects of areas undergoing gentrification. Cultural creatives from across North America would be comfortable here. There are artisanal brew pubs and icecream shops, intimate coffee shops and restaurants repurposed from unlikely storefronts (one was a former garage), one-of-a-kind furniture and gift stores, an artist co-op, art school and bike store.
Food specialty shops are the city equivalent of the pioneer species that burst forth after an area has been ravaged by a forest fire. But very quickly, signs crop up that this is more than a unique shopping experience based on the delightfully spontaneous jumble of cultural creative-and counter culture-inspired hangouts.
A huge church, as was standard in Old Quebec, is at the centre of the street scene. Nearby is a public library that shares a section of the street with a low-end eatery, a budget hotel, regional headquarters for a credit union and trade union. A block away is a provincial office of the ministry of tourism and a large Mountain Equipment Co-op store. Since 2000, the entire street has been pedestrianized, given over to those who jaunt through neighbourhood at a walker’s pace.
Almost all the housing in the area comes from Quebec’s iconic balconied triplexes, a mainstay of dense and affordable communities. A typical triplex has one floor for the, who pays a major portion of the mortgage with rental from two triplex tenants, thereby allowing working people to afford to buy handymen’s specials while providing tenants with low rents.
What we see here is a distinctive culture of collaboration, not just a distinctive language group. In Quebec, which has pulled itself up by the bootstraps, people from many walks of life and all levels of government have learned to work together. In French, it’s called “concertation.” It doesn’t cost more. It’s about leverage from partnerships, not money.
With concertation, all assets of a society are put together to see what kind of whole will emerge that is bigger than the parts. What if unions and co-ops — including the mighty Desjardins credit union, with over $150 billion in assets and some$60 million a year donated to community projects – join up with libraries, tourism offices, and city planners to see what a strategy could do for a city? The staff alone from these offices can keep a score of restaurants alive, for example. And the social economy-private economy-public sector economy-informal economy mix provides the ten destinations necessary for any up-and-coming hopping public space, according to the New York-based Project for Public Spaces.
Quebec’s traditions lend themselves to what urban expert Jeb Brugmann calls the Strategic City. It’s the antidote to the “crisis city,” torn apart by a two-way conflict that destroys both sides. It’s also the counterpoint to the “opportunity city,” where a jumble of creatives can’t break through to win support from political or economic power brokers. Brugmann, who lives in Toronto, doesn’t miss the chance to describe his adopted as the epitome of an opportunity city.
By contrast, this Quebec City project fits Brugmann’s code to a T. “When mutually supportive activities are located in proximity,” he writes, “their concentration has a further synergistic effect.” He argues that “one of the most basic and least practiced arts of city building today is the creative use of density –proximity and concentration – in the city’s built form.”
Maybe one municipal candidate will learn this language.
Visiting Japan a few years ago changed the way I look at the difference between conventional and nuclear war.
On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima became the target for the first atomic bomb dropped on civilian populations, a chilling example of the use of non-conventional weapons. That moment is now commemorated around the world every August.
But when I saw Hisoshima, it was a bright and bustling place, and the only obvious sign of a catastrophic past was the absence of anything from the period before 1945 – save for one beautiful tree left unharmed and the smashed and twisted relic of one building, the only rubble kept as a memento.
After a day’s numbing tour of the peace memorial and another day touring the newly-sprouted city, I returned to Tokyo. One of the world’s five most powerful cities, Tokyo stands alone among the world’s great cities for having no significant signs of human habitation from before 1945. That city had been bombed “back into the stone age,” by conventional planes dropping conventional firebombs.
This reality is worth noting when the world is spending more on military tools than ever before, much of that for conventional weapons. That’s why, for example, August commemorations of Hiroshima need to reflect on recent Canadian decisions to spend $18 billion on conventional military tools – based on a tally of new fighter planes, the contract for maintaining them, as well as two new naval ships costing a mere $2.6 billion. I worry that people, even critics, don’t get it.
To date, most commentators on the arms deal controversy have criticized the proposed purchasing contract. It’s been called a “boondoggle” because one of the largest purchasing contracts in Canadian history will be awarded solely to one U.S corporate giant, Lockheed Martin, without benefit of a competitive bid subject to public oversight or input. The House of Commons defence committee has not even been convened. The lack of governance smells bad in an age when transparency is seen as essential to democracy; a retired assistant deputy minister of defence has publicly protested this.
The military logic, if there is such a thing, also comes up wanting, say most commentators. Why a one-engine plane, instead of a more resilient model with two engines? Why a “flying Cadillac” that can’t fly very far without refueling, making it difficult to service protection of Canadian sovereignty or conduct search and rescue in the Arctic? Why are these planes so similar to the stealth planes recently bought by the U.S. military, when Canada has rarely mounted surprise attacks of aggression?
Because of the impact my visits to Hiroshima and Tokyo had on me, I’d like to explore this deal from a different angle. I want to figure out why, two decades after the cold war ended and a period of some dampening of nuclear overkill capability, governments of all types and sizes are spending more than ever on tools of war.
According to research by the well-respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), world military expenditures in 2009 topped $1.5 trillion. That’s more than the total income of half the world’s population, about 2.4 per cent of the world’s total economic expenditures, or about $217 for each person in the world today – enough to solve at least one major problem such as hunger every year.
Two-thirds of that war money is spent by the same Big 5 world powers who sit on the United Nations security council, and who are formally responsible for world collective security (aka world peace), as well as the UN’s millennial commitments to end poverty, hunger and discrimination.
U.S. spending accounts for 46 per cent of global spending on war tools. The UN’s entire budget amounts to 1.8 per cent of weapons spending.
Long ago, in the period after the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin Wall fell, there was talk of a “peace dividend” – of money freed up from military purposes and made available for human development, not destruction. Indeed, there was a significant decline in military spending during the 1990s – from $1.2 trillion in 1985 to 809 billion in 1998. Then along came the terrorist threat – a threat quite different from that posed by competing national governments, usually fought out during wars. But that’s when budgets to fight enemy governments soared – up 48 per cent relative to 2000. The U.S. alone spends 44 times more on weapons than all six governments labeled as rogue states;
Though people like me, who promote food-based economic development strategies, like to brag that demand for food is recession-proof, I have to admit that the sources of life are nowhere near as recession-proof as the sources of death. In 2009, a year before G20 nations decided it was time to clamp down on government spending to stimulate economic recovery, 16 members of the elite club spent more on weapons than the year before.
Oddly enough, few analysts of the global economic recession attribute any damage to world economies wrought by this expenditure on materials that create no social, health, community or other value and very few jobs – compared to what that money would yield if invested in food and shelter, both labor-intensive sectors. But prisons and armies – what some economists call military and gulag Keynesianism – always get to the front of the line.
By global standards for wealthy nations, Canada remains a bit player. As a bit player, Canada spends about 19 billion a year on the military, or about 1.3 per cent of the GNP. That doesn’t affect the world balance of terror, just the misbalancing of priorities. As the late Tommy Douglas (founder of Canada’s medicare system, among other accomplishments) used to say, the US has hawks and doves; but Canadian governments are always parrots.
