Marginal Notes: The Calgary 2010 Municipal Election in the Context of Neoliberal Urbanism

With the Calgary 2010 Municipal Election fast approaching, I think it's worthwhile to develop a context in which to consider the issues and the candidates.

In 'Municipal Malaise: Neoliberal Urbanism and the Future of Our Cities,' Fanelli and Paulson discuss neoliberal restructuring of Canadian cities:

The 2008 Annual Report by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, written when the Federal government was pulling in nearly $14-billion in budget surpluses, paints a grim picture of the coming collapse of Canada's municipal infrastructure. The report found that Canada has used up 79 per cent of the service life of its public infrastructure and has set the price of eliminating the infrastructural deficit at $123-billion. While that figure is already large, the chronic underfunding of municipal projects appears much worse when framed not in terms of the cities we have, but the cities we want to live in: the funding gap would have to take into consideration a range of issues including poverty and affordable housing, environmental protection, urban redesign and renewal, and expansion of the arts, cultural centres and other public spaces. Of course, fiscal crises in our cities are nothing new; the last three decades have been characterized by increased service demands, population growth, tax-shifting, pressures brought on by amalgamation, and federal and provincial offloading. Yet the ongoing recession has become a pretext for consolidating and intensifying processes of “neoliberal urbanism.”

Neoliberal urbanism broadly refers to a range of punctuated and uneven urban processes taking place in the communities where we live and work. This includes the privatization, restructuring, and elimination of public goods and municipal services; the shifting of the cost of maintenance of public resources onto the working class; the increasing precariousness of work; the devolution of responsibilities onto local governments without matching fiscal supports; the scaling of regulatory capacities upwards to regional or international institutions (characterized by little transparency, accountability, or public consultation); the reining in of the power of municipal unions and community groups; the scaling back of social entitlement programs; and expansion of so-called “public-private partnerships” that aim to create new zones of accumulation and shift a significant part of the responsibility for urban governance to corporations.
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Yet our cities, time after time, are taking it on the chin. While the federal and provincial governments have a variety of relatively flexible revenue sources (such as income, sales, corporate, resource and import taxes – tools which remain at their disposal, whether or not they choose to use them), only 8 cents on every dollar collected go back to Canada's municipalities. For our cities, property taxes remain the major source of funding, and from this, they must provide for their public utilities, public works, parks and recreational facilities, waste management, transit services, public housing, and a whole range of other social and community services and local initiatives. However, since the 1980s successive governments at both the federal and provincial levels looked to ‘correct’ their budget deficits by transferring greater amounts of fiscal responsibility onto municipalities, without providing for additional fiscal capacities. This process, commonly referred to as service ‘downloading’ (or the ‘devolution revolution’), expanded the fiscal requirements of cities without any increases in revenue sharing or generation. This is particularly clear in the fiscal crisis of Canada's largest city; if, as some have argued, Ontario represents the pre-eminent neoliberal province, Toronto has likewise come to epitomize municipal neoliberalism at the urban scale.

Describing the Toronto case, the authors write:

Decades of growth on Bay Street, coupled with the casualization of employment (particularly in the low-wage service sector), have taken their toll on Toronto's poor. To make way for gentrification, the homeless and low-income populations were forced out of the urban core long before the recession. Toronto's official unemployment rate stands at 9.5 per cent, but the 'real' number – including those who need more work than they can find just to make ends meet – is much higher. With more than 180,000 tenants living in poorly-funded public housing, and another 70,000 on a ten-year wait-list, welfare caseloads have risen nearly 25 per cent when compared with 2008. People of colour, women, single-parent households, the differently-abled, students, and seniors continue to fair far worse as their skills are apparently ‘uncompetitive’ given the need to maximize profits. The criminalization of poverty and homelessness, however, continues full steam ahead with the Toronto police force's operating budget skyrocketing from $541-million in 1999 to $855-million just ten years later (roughly 35 per cent more than the rate of inflation). Austerity does not, apparently, extend to the need to patrol the gentrified urban core. This can hardly be understood as anything other than a transfer of resources from the maintenance of public goods to the publicly-funded protection of private ones.

I invite readers to read the full text of the article to see how Toronto, Vancouver and Ottawa have downloaded costs onto citizens by increasing property taxes, increasing service fees such as parking and transit costs and privatizing services. Another common thread is the undermining of unions, especially those representing civic employees and lay offs of these workers.

For a discussion of Calgary, I recommend Miller's book chapter - 'Modes of Governance, Modes of Resistance: Contesting Neoliberalism in Calgary.' He discusses the decline in public revenues at the provincial level with the implementation of the flat tax and changes to the royalty regime. He notes that provincial transfers of public revenues stood at 21.9% of total municipal revenues in 1988, but dropped to 15.9% by 2001, despite increased municipal responsibilities.

How do we respond? Fanelli and Paulson suggest:

While we certainly need to be pushing the burden of the fiscal crisis onto the capitalist class and off the backs of workers, and we can (and should) argue for greater commitments by the federal and provincial governments to alleviate the fiscal crisis of the cities, it should be clear that the management and funding of Canada's municipalities is fundamentally broken.

Fixing them requires a new kind of broad social movement unionism, and a great deal of collective capacity building in order to bring together workers, social justice activists, and community groups. In short, we ought to stop treating cities as the backbone of capital and treat them as the places that most of us live, work and play. Our collective struggles have tended to take the form of demands of the city, while they ought to be based in class consciousness – and urban consciousness – and demand instead the opportunity to restructure the city to serve our needs rather than those of capital.

With the onset of 2010 Calgary Municipal Election, we need to use our understanding of neoliberal urbanism to frame our understanding of issues and solutions. Public services in the city are inextricably tied to provincial and federal funding and the influence of corporations.

Both ImagineCALGARY and Vibrant Communities Calgary offer policy papers on issues ranging from sustainable planning to a living wage. In my view, these initiatives are far superior to The Better Calgary Campaign which places less focus on social, economic and environmental justice.

I believe it would be beneficial for these initiatives to work with a campaign at the provincial level such as Join Together Alberta. This would allow for the building of a citizen's movement making synchronized demands at both provincial and local levels.

Ultimately, we need change at the provincial level before we will seen any meaningful change in the City of Calgary. Climenhaga makes a strong case that the Alberta NDP should emphasize an urban agenda. For instance on the issue of social services, Climenhaga writes:

When Tories cut social services, who pays? Urban taxpayers, that’s who! We pay more for policing, health care, basic services required just to keep our fellow humans from freezing to death. We pay in crime, run-down neighbourhoods, foregone business opportunities and illness, physical and mental. And ever-higher municipal taxes, of course. Rural-based, rural-focused parties like the Conservatives don’t really give a hoot. By speaking up for social services and an end to downloading costs as city issues, the NDP would be speaking up for urban taxpayers, safer cities and a better life. They'd also be fighting for the socially disadvantaged, which is as it should be.

As the 2010 Calgary Municipal Election approaches, we need identify and support candidates who can stand up to corporations and who can explain to people that the imagined savings of the flat tax only lead to higher taxes and fees in the city. We need people who envision Calgary as a place to live as opposed to a place for sale.

With a provincial election expected in 2011 or 2012, we can hope for the strong presence of MLAs who will fight for the necessary legislative changes needed to support cities in becoming more inhabitable places for citizens!