University of Glasgow Conference: Securing the Urban Renaissance: Policing, Community and Disorder

Hegel in Parkdale

David MacGregor King’s University College at the University of Western [email protected]

Joe Hermer Department of Sociology University of [email protected]

Unfortunately, my colleague Joe Hermer could not be here today – so this means that with your indulgence, I am going to have to give a quite modified paper.

The original idea for the paper was to work together blending in Joe Hermer’s work as a criminologist on the regulation of begging, reciprocity and public compassion on public pavements –what Joe has referred to as a gift encounter—with my work on political theory. The paper was meant to address attempts by government in the UK to govern homelessness, and specifically begging, through visual advertisements that are consistent with city centre rejuvenation projects. What I am going to do instead is twofold—and still, I think, relevant to our theme today. First, I want to outline some of the political shifts that have taken place in our province of Ontario in terms of social assistance to the poor generally. And, secondly, link these to some of the changes that have occurred in the Toronto neighbourhood that we both live in, South Parkdale.

This exploratory paper is part of a project Joe and I are working on called, Hegel in Parkdale. We want to explore how Hegel (if he were alive today) might react to the new urban realities in the rapidly changing neighbourhood in Toronto called South Parkdale—or the Village of Parkdale, 1879, as some gentrifiers would like to call it. (Indeed few residents—gentrifiers or not—use the phrase, South Parkdale. The neighbourhood is almost universally called Parkdale.) Our project will likely benefit from a massive five-year research initiative called “Community Gentrification and Building Inclusive Communities from Within: A Case Study of Toronto’s West-Central Neighbourhoods.” This is a five-year million-dollar research program funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Resarch Council of Canada that will involve St. Christopher House in Toronto and the Centre for Urban and Community Studies at the .

David Harvey1 observes that Hegel privileges space in his philosophy compared to Marx’s emphasis on social class. Hegel’s spacialized conception of the state at the end of history offers a geopolitical perspective that emphasizes linkage between place and the social sense of personal and community identity. Hegel captures the local and the global, the particular and the universal, without collapsing one into the other, or destroying the vital linkage between these dualities and individual experience.

Hegel also introduced the concept of civil society as a partial element of the state. Within civil society he identified the three parallel and interacting structures: (i) the economy (or system of needs), (ii) the administration of justice, (iii) the police and the corporation.

Anglo-American philosophical encounters with Hegel once tended to conflate his concept of the police with the notion of authoritarian regulation by agents of the law. But Hegel was referring to the great wave of social regulation that started in the German states and spread across Europe. Before Hegel’s death in 1831 Britain proceeded to adopt European notions of the police and applied them in revolutionary ways. The

1 The Condition of Postmodernity, 1989, p. 273. birth of the modern concept of childhood likely coincided with the Factory Acts of 1832 and the attempt to determine exactly the scope of application of the law. As Joe argues in his Oxford PhD thesis another arm of this nineteenth century push for regulation was the transfer of focus in regulation of begging from the beggar to the gift-giver. Compassion became a new site of regulation

Taking advantage of this Hegelian framework, the paper will discuss how recent political events in Ontario have deeply affected Parkdale, a community undergoing a process of gentrification hinged to neoconservative values and neoliberal strategies.

First, and very briefly, what we saw in Ontario, beginning a decade ago, with the election of the Progressive Conservative government of in 1995, was a set of neoconservative reforms. Simply put, in the context of poor people, we witnessed an unraveling of both the symbolic and material means by which society collectively organizes our responsibilities to others. The high point of this era (or the lowest one) was the Safe Streets Act, a piece of legislation meant to increase the re-election chances of the Mike Harris government. Following its overwhelming victory in the polls, the government put this generally popular legislation in place on January 31st 2000. I will talk further about the Safe Streets Act in a moment.

In a dialectical reversal Hegel might have appreciated the year 2000 also brought the Walkerton disaster. During the Victoria Day weekend at the end of May—perhaps the biggest secular holiday of the year—water runoff from manure coated farmers’ fields poisoned with deadly e-coli the wells of a prosperous small town called Walkerton, just north of Toronto. With the authorities paralysed for three horrific days, tainted water caused a number of deaths and poisoned more than 3000 people. Kidney failure was common; for weeks little children were helicoptered out of the beleaguered town and sent to London, Ontario hospitals. Even today, many citizens in Walkerton remain critically ill.

Why should this affair in a small town five years ago have any relevance for the urban renaissance we are discussing today? Walkerton may have signalled the beginning of the decline and fall of neoliberalism in Ontario. The public blamed the e-coli outbreak on cutbacks in services, particularly the public regulation of the water supply. Walkerton became a sign that government costcutting of all sorts associated with neoliberalism were untenable. But Walkerton also, I believe, undermined the moral authority of neoconservatism, its connection with probity and self-righteousness, its assumption of superiority to lesser beings. Within two years Mike Harris resigned from office, replaced by , whose government was soundly defeated in October 2003 by the Ontario Liberals under Dalton McGuinty.

Later I will discuss the extent to which the McGuinty Liberals have changed the political climate in Ontario and the possible effect of such changes on conditions that are the subject of this conference: crime control, policing, security and safety within urban spaces.

First I return to the glory days of neoliberalism in Ontario, before Walkerton. The bloody debut of the Mike Harris government came at a contested park called Ipperwash, formerly a native burial ground turned army explosives range. Here in summer 1995 a police sharpshooter shot in cold blood a native protestor, Dudley George—the first official shooting of an aboriginal protestor in Ontario. Meanwhile, Mike Harris cut personal income tax 20 percent to pay back ‘honest’ and ‘hardworking’ taxpayers. As with the murder of Dudley George, the government targeted the most marginalized people in society – demonizing them as disorderly, immoral, and criminal; slashing social assistance rates by 21.6 percent, and passing the ‘safe streets act’, a sweeping and mean spirited modern vagrancy law that targets a range of subsistence activities that poor people carry out on the street to survive.

A corollary movement to this re-arrangement of a political economy of obligation is how much of the sphere of social policy generally, and particularly that of social welfare, was re-inscribed as a crime control problem. Those in need were constituted as “disorderly people,” who must be policed. The conflation of social assistance administration with the fight to ‘crack down’ on welfare fraud was an exemplar of this shift.

The Safe Streets Act represents the first time a modern Ontario legislature (as opposed to a municipal by-law) has enacted a statute against vagrancy. Its key target was squeegee kids, street youths who earned money by washing the windshields of cars in traffic. But in effect the law extended to anyone who appeared to be indigent and was requesting money or an equivalent in an “aggressive” manner from a “captive audience”. The outcome—and the likely intent—of the statute were to restrict begging in all public places.

But as Joe Hermer notes, the intent of regulation of begging is not really to control the action of the beggar, but to “police compassion”—that is to regulate the action of the person on the other side of what Joe calls, the “begging encounter”. There is within the formulation of neoliberal legislation in this area the germ of what Joe calls “a personal ethic of generosity, a private policing of the self where expressions of compassion are subject to rational order.” A paradox arises where the presence of begging brings into question not only the moral character of the beggar but also that of the importuned passer-by.

The new Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty has enormously altered the political terrain in Ontario, though we can only speculate on the ultimate effect of its policies on the process of gentrification in South Parkdale.

Before looking more closely at South Parkdale, I want to describe briefly some of the political changes associated with the Ontario Liberal government, now barely 20 months old. Let us admit that many of the punitive reforms made by the Mike Harris government are untouched. The Safe Streets Act remains in force. Indeed, as Joe’s concept of policing compassion would predict, Torontonians are noticeably more reluctant to give to the poor from their motor vehicles than they were prior to introduction of the act. Hegel would reinforce this observation: people respond more fully to the moral authority of government than most of us are prepared to admit. Despite Liberal gestures toward a more generous approach to the poor, and a progressive new mayor of Toronto named David Miller, some recent police actions— such as clearing street people from the area surrounding City Hall—are reminiscent of the previous regime.

Nevertheless, Ontario is caught up in a massive reform. Last year the McGuinty government raised personal income taxes substantially to pay for medicare. This was the first tax increase following almost a decade of steady tax cuts. The Liberal move was a calculated risk, and started a political storm among Ontario’s tax -averse residents. A year later, however, the tax is mostly accepted and likely no longer a political factor. In the 2003 election, the Liberals presented themselves as a gentle alternative to the who relished fights with Ontario teachers. In education the change is palpable. There is peace at last in the schools after a decade of Tory upheaval. The government just announced a $5 billion increase for postsecondary education.

The government has not moved as decisively on certain social fronts, but even here the shift from the Tories is dramatic. Combining with the Paul Martin government in Ottawa, the Ontario Liberals are significantly re-investing in public housing—an area the Tories left to die. This program will likely have an important impact in South Parkdale and other deprived urban communities in Toronto. A new, reform-minded police chief, and a re-constituted police relations board, offer promise that adversary relations between the police and minority communities in Toronto may be reparable. McGuinty announced last year a derisory raise of three percent to social welfare—hardly anything given the Mike Harris 1995 cut of almost 22 percent and a decade of inflation— but nevertheless, a start. The Liberals have rescinded the neoliberal Tenant Protection Act which gutted rent controls and handed power to the landlords. The spouse-in-the- house law, which took welfare away from women discovered to have a male partner is gone (though this was due to a court ruling rather than government action). A tragic case in which a young woman forcibly removed from welfare died in horrendous circumstances, facilitated a Liberal move to drop the law that a welfare offence meant lifelong ineligibility for social assistance. The Liberals have restored nutritional supplements for pregnant women on welfare.

I want to conclude this paper with some observations on the impact of the Liberal reform regime to conditions in South Parkdale. Both Hermer and I live in Parkdale. Joe resides in a finished first floor apartment of a converted family dwelling, north of Queen Street. My family lives in one of Parkdale’s stately Victorian homes, built in 1883—the year Marx died, when Parkdale was a thriving lakeside commuter suburb, and considered Toronto’s most desirable neighbourhood. In the late 1970s our house stood empty and ruined, awaiting demolition, and likely replacement by another of the huge apartment complexes that dot Parkdale. But the house was brought back from the brink in 1979 and—along with a row of splendid homes—renovated, one hundred years after the founding of Parkdale Village.

A state-of-the-art freeway called the Gardiner caused the near-destruction of our home and the wreck of much of Parkdale. A component of the 1960s love for the automobile and disdain for old neighbourhoods, the Gardiner—a raised futuristic expressway built between 1955 and 1964—knocked out almost 200 Parkdale homes, evaporated whole streets, and destroyed the famous Sunnyside Amusement Park that spread out on the shore by Lake Ontario). The neighbourhood was already under stress, affected first by the 1930s depression and then the post-war housing conversions that carved up large homes into working class apartments. City officials encouraged construction of towering apartment blocks to house those made homeless by the Gardiner.

Judging from the street I live on—Gwynne Avenue, which runs south from Queen Street—even in the days of its greatest glory Parkdale was a mixed community. A row of workers’ cottages built around the same time as our house, extends up the block. Family breadwinners from the cottages likely worked in nearby manufacturing establishments in what is now called Liberty Village (just a block or two south-east of Gwynne). The 1980s recovery of Gwynne Avenue was a joint product of private enterprise and government intervention. The street’s lone mansion—an architecturally notable structure—is occupied by formerly homeless families. An infill housing project stretches for half a block across from the restored Victorians. Even under the Mike Harris Tories there was progress: exemplified by the large, modern and bustling Parkdale Community Health Centre that sits at the intersection of Gwynne and Queen Street West. Just a block west of Gwynne on Queen there is a coffee house called, the Ground Level Café—this is a federally funded project with managers and servers drawn from the city’s population of street kids.

Liberty Village is now an astonishing complex of restored classic Victorian manufacturing buildings that is likely unrivaled anywhere in Canada and may even compare favourably with similar Victorian restoration projects in Britain. Although the manufacturers of the period when Gwynne Avenue was founded are long gone, Liberty Village has a rich diversity of high tech suppliers, software manufacturers, and digital printing establishments. It endured a growth hiccup with the collapse of high tech at the beginning of the century, but quickly regained its footing.

Tom Slater’s excellent and provocative surveys of South Parkdale provide me with some final touchstones for the impact of the changing Ontario political scene on the neighbourhood. But we should keep in mind that one factor in the Liberal success story so far has been a prosperous economy in Ontario, where unemployment is at a thirty year low. This has had an inevitable and favourable impact on Parkdale, as it has in other neighbourhoods in the city.

Slater has documented the conflict in Parkdale between “incoming gentrifiers and artists and a long standing population of poor and marginalized residents.” We touch on this conflict below. Slater admits, however, that this may be less than half the story. Parkdale may be the most diverse residential neighbourhood on the planet. This is the elephant in the room that dwarfs other aspects of the Parkdale drama. The large Parkdale apartment buildings built in the 1950s and 1960s are now filled with immigrants from every imaginable part of the earth. The scene on the major arteries of King Street, and Queen Street East features a teeming and constant flow of people from Vietnam, Rwanda, Bangla Desh, Pakistan, India, the Philippines, China, Chile, Brazil, Ecuador, Guatemala, Arabia, and Serbia. Chinese and Tagolog (Philippines) has supplanted Vietnamese since 1996 for the top unofficial language spoken in Parkdale.

Based on research completed three years ago, Slater observed that Parkdale is gentrifying rapidly, a process that affected even areas that seemed unlikely ever to be restored. Even then, Parkdale was still the butt of middle-class derision and fear and source of newspaper articles about druggies and street people. These stories no longer circulate. Only three years after Slater completed his research Parkdale is almost absent from the papers except as a fashionable location for young couples seeking to move up from the condominiums. Bidding wars have propelled housing prices skyward. Though prices are still only a fraction of those of its erstwhile fashion rival Rosedale, Parkdale is now a desirable location. The westward movement of gentrification on Queen Street West , in which artist studios, cafes, galleries, clothing shops and restaurants abound, has accelerated, reaching past Gwynne and deep into Parkdale. The middle classes who once displaced working class families in Parkdale are now in turn being bought out by upper middle class homeowners.

There is no shortage yet of the homeless and the poor in Parkdale. Queen Street West accommodates a number of charitable institutions that assist the poor. The neighbourhood retains its gritty feel. Gentrification could never anyway homogenize Parkdale because immigrants make up a large part of the neighbourhood, as we noted. These are ambitious families with bright futures in mind for their offspring. Their children make up large segments of the student population in excellent neighbourhood schools, like Parkdale Collegiate Institute. Conflict between gentrifiers and the poor and marginalized remains an issue, but it is more muted now than before, as is social conflict generally in Toronto now that the Tories have departed.

Parkdale must now deal with the contradictions of success. Despite gentrification, it has retained many of its traditional, poorer residents, who may now profit from the Liberal government’s plan for social housing. Neighbourhood schools crippled by the Harris Tories who did not understand Toronto are experiencing renewed social investment. An economic downturn could threaten all this—killing the still financially fragile galleries, restaurants and clothing shops on Parkdale’s section of Queen Street West or bankrupting new homeowners with giant-sized mortgages. Poverty is being sanitized, if not destroyed in Parkdale, but at what cost? The neighbourhood may now face a quandary: what to do when small businesses close, and are perhaps supplanted by big corporate entities like Starbucks? What does one do when a small business closes? Bring in a Tim Horton’s? Leave it abandoned? What does a mixed economy of uses actually mean? What will happen to the working class taverns that dot the main thoroughfares on Queen and King?

Perhaps these are trivial questions for a philosopher of world historical transformation? America is the land of the future, Hegel wrote. Standing on the corner of Dufferin and King, the heart of Parkdale, you can see the outline of the Toronto Carpet Building: a mature example of the 19th Century industrial revolution in Canada. A block away stand houses built around 1883 when Marx died. No country in the world is more consciously Hegelian than this one (though Japan may represent the Hegelian unconscious). But there are no street signs signifying his influence. Is this the future Hegel dreamed of? The McDonald’s drive-through restaurant sharing a corner with the staid though classic Bank of Montreal building is gaudy and bright. After all this, poverty still has the same solution: send the poor into the streets. While waiting for the King streetcar, brushing shoulders with immigrants from the Punjab and Niger, you may attract the attention of beggars, if you look like you may have some change in your pocket.