Commentaire 381 – commentaires et rétroaction

Gillian Mason

Ontario Electoral Commission
Public Hearing Participation October 18, 2022
Scarborough Civic Centre
Remarks by Gillian Mason

Thank you, Justice Leitch. Commissioners. Good evening.

I am honoured to speak to you briefly today.

"Good governance starts with good representation."

The perspective I bring is both highly local and international. In fact, I speak to you from three perspectives.

Firstly, I am a lifelong resident of Scarborough: more than 6 decades.

Secondly, I speak as the former Senior Vice President of United Way Toronto, where I oversaw the investment in social services agencies in this City to the tune of $115 million annually.

As part of that, I also oversaw ongoing research into the geography of poverty: you will be familiar with our landmark study: Poverty by Postal Code.

And so, you will by now be aware of the number of under resourced communities in this part of Toronto that are populated by equity-deserving folks.

So, I am well acquainted with the poverty – both visible and invisible – that characterizes this part of our great city. My primary concern is with the relative voicelessness of the people who live here.

Thirdly, I speak to you today with a much wider perspective:

For 13 years I served the international membership of .... an association of Clerks of the Privy Council/Cabinet Secretaries and Deputy Ministers and Ministers in the then 54 countries of the Commonwealth [the then Commonwealth Association for Public Administration and Management – CAPAM].

Good governance was the focus of this membership association, which I had the honour of co-founding.

I was there when our membership, our countries' leaders, rallied around their colleagues in South Africa in 1995; working with them to help them establish a truly robust and democratic post-apartheid state.

I also witnessed -- first-hand -- serious threats and contractions to some of those Commonwealth democracies. I thus learned, directly, how fragile our democracies are. I saw that our cherished democratic states are always only as strong as our willingness – and our ability - to defend them, which is determined, in part, by the depth of their representativeness.

So, as a proud Scarborough resident and Canadian citizen, I cannot stand by without speaking to this imprudent effort to reduce the access to government, thereby weakening our Canadian representative form of government.

You have heard from my friends, my colleagues and my fellow residents and businesses of Scarborough. Their powerful arguments, grounded in our local reality to help you to see how misguided and misdirected is this proposal.

This evening I am grateful to be able to add my voice; not least for the 50,000 people who are not counted in the Census.

When I was 18, I worked in this building as a summer student urban planner, when it was the seat of local government for our community: The Scarborough Civic Centre, opened by the Queen. We'd come a long way from being the Township then the Borough of Scarborough to become a City, with all of the rights and privileges, of a City. As a City with its City Hall right here, most importantly, we had immediate access, local access, to decision-makers and the decision-making directly affecting us.

Fast forward 20 years and the Province amalgamated the City and this award-winning, Raymond Moriyama-designed building became a hollow shell. Yes, it housed some municipal government departments, but the heart of government had moved downtown

Fast forward another 20 years and the 44 seats in Toronto became 25 seats.

So, when I say that any decision to reduce rather than increase the representation of one of the fastest growing parts of our country – a part overrepresented by those with the fewest resources (thus, the weakest voices) – there is no rationale that can support that.

This is precisely the time when we should be ensuring the diverse voices, those not yet appropriately represented in our public dialogues, take their rightful part in together building our new and evolving democracy.

Any attempt to shrink rather than increase the access we have to government decision-making, to diminish our representativeness, in turn weakens our country's democracy.

"Good governance starts and ends with good representation."

Justice Leitch/ Commissioners: We respectfully ask that you ensure the recommendations of this Commission strengthen rather than weaken our cherished state.

Thank you