July 22, 2023

By Valentina Shamoun and Sydney John-Baptise, both Torontonians and members of BGC Canada’s National Youth Council

Dear Future Mayor – Toronto is a vibrant, multicultural city. The sheer number of traditions and opportunities – from jobs to culture to entertainment – draw people from around the world to live, study and work here. But without young people, this vibrancy is at risk.

Young people are finding it harder and harder to live here. We kept hearing that coming out of the pandemic, the city would come roaring back to life – prosperity, fun and relief that the worst was behind us and we could work toward fixing our city’s problems. It doesn’t feel that way living in Toronto these days. We are finding it hard to feel optimistic about our future here.

Dear Mayor, how are you going to help revive our city?

Young people can barely live here anymore. Did you know that the average age of Torontonians is now over 40? The average rent is over $2,500/month which is impossible for most young people to afford, pushing us further and further out to the edges of the city or out of the GTA altogether. We constantly hear that ‘young people don’t want to work’, especially in entry-level jobs, retail, and hospitality. That’s not it – we just can’t afford to live in Toronto and make those wages. Why would we commute into the city to make $16 an hour? Many of us are trying to get by on insufficient OSAP funds, piecing together part-time work, orare already drowning in student debt. It can take us an hour and a half to get from Scarborough to downtown in rush hour, each way. That’s 15 hours a week we could be working or studying instead. It just doesn’t make sense. We are worried about what downtown Toronto will look like in 5 or 10 years. Where will youth fit in?

What are you going to do immediately about violence on the TTC? Because most of us don’t feel safe. Ridership is down since pre-pandemic levels, but violence is up. Teens, especially young women, are taking the streetcar to the GO train in some areas because it’s not safe to be underground after dark with no cell service. It’s an expensive and inconvenient option that we resent. Dear Mayor, why does a world-class city not have cell service on subway trains in 2023? Youth don’t care about battles with big telecom. We cannot wait two years for this to happen – every day without it makes stepping underground feel like a roll of the dice.

How do you plan to advocate for marginalized youth and provide more mental health resources? More than 300 students have been involved in violent incidents so far this year. There is clearly a crisis in our schools. Students who are struggling, especially those with special needs, have been chronically under-served. Will you fight for equitable education and everyone’s right to feel safe in the classroom?

Dear Mayor, when was the last time you worked in the community? Spoke to someone who is unhoused unless you were in front a camera? Most youth want a mayor who has spent years working in the community because it’s the only way to truly understand the crisis going on now. The kind of mayor who cares less about showing up at the Pride Parade for a photo op and more about keeping trans kids safe and advocating for the health of 2S & LGBTQIA+ youth on a daily basis.

Dear Future Mayor, please don’t think we’ve lost hope. Young people need things to change and need you to show us you can get things done. Let us be a part of the strength of this great city we love so much.

Read more:

• National Youth Council Statement on Anti-Trans Legislation
• National Youth Council Statement on Mental Health

By Owen Charters, President & CEO, BGC Canada

May 2, 2023

On my way to the office every day, I pass by an apartment building. It seems innocuous. Lots of green space. Near a ravine. Seems reasonably well-kept (from a distance). Not far from the subway.

It’s actually part of a complex of apartments, all in a park setting. The area is called Crescent Town. Our West Scarborough Club is at the edge of Crescent Town.

Interesting sidenote: the actor Kiefer Sutherland grew up there. His parents didn’t have much money at the time (being actors—but look how that turned out for them).

This type of apartment building was part of a post-war boom in urban design and planning, and can be found all over Canada. Toronto has a multitude—almost 1,500—most of them in suburbs. They’re old. They need constant maintenance. Their systems are usually inefficient.

So, what’s of note about these buildings? They’re quiet, and as I said earlier, innocuous. I spent the first two years of my life in one at Jane and Finch, in Toronto. They were supposed to be the hallmark of modern living. But they aren’t anymore—they are part of a different way of living.

Canada has lots of pockets of poverty, and what’s surprising is that they are so hidden away. When we think of poverty, we think of run-down houses, cars well past their prime in driveways. Neglected neighbourhoods. That’s not actually the picture of poverty in a lot of Canada—it’s more how Hollywood depicts poverty.

Poverty lives in apartment buildings like Crescent Town. Not far from Cresent Town is Teesdale, a group of community housing high-rises with even more significant challenges.

I used to volunteer door-to-door for a federal politician in Thorncliffe Park, a very high-density neighbourhood in Toronto filled with these apartment buildings. The faces that answered the doors of these apartments were the face of modern poverty in Canada. Polite. Often women. Mostly recent immigrants. Not very keen to open the door to someone who was carrying a clipboard and looked like they were from the government. And usually with cleaning supplies in one hand—the apartments were mostly spotless. And full—there was often more than one face peering around the door frame.

Their lives are tough. These apartments are at the edges of transit accessibility. Infrastructure is lacking. In 2017, the average household income across Toronto Community Housing (which owns many of these apartments) was just over $17,000. Let’s put that number in perspective again: the LICO (low-income cut off) is a calculation of how much income a family of a certain size requires. If their income drops below this threshold, the family struggles significantly to pay for the essential necessities of life—shelter, food, etc. The LICO for a family of four in the same year was $39,701.

And the amplifying factor is that Toronto is creating neighbourhoods of poverty that are increasingly isolated from the rest of the city. From United Way’s A Tale of Two Torontos: “in 1980, there were only five very-low-income neighbourhoods and in 2015, there were 88.” The 13 highest priority neighbourhoods in Toronto are characterized by a density of post-war apartment towers.

Sadly, poverty is hidden away and it’s this lack of integration with the rest of community that exacerbates the effects of poverty.

The pandemic has exposed and exacerbated poverty and isolation in Canadian communities. We need to start moving in the direction of more access, more integration, more supports and more BGC Clubs. We need to reduce the isolating effects of poverty. Kiefer Sutherland stars in Designated Survivor, and the title might be more appropriate to him making it out of Crescent Town than his role in the show.

We’ve got some work to do.

Read more:

• A BGC Alumni Story
• A Club is a Club is a Club?
• The root causes of our mental health crisis