In my last post I addressed the problem of — to use the technical term — bullshit verbiage in municipal politics.
Every city says they’re viable, innovative, etc (just as every job applicant says they’re motivated, adaptable, goal-driven, team-oriented, etc). You have to say stuff like that regardless of validity. When you’re a mayor it’s just like breathing: if people don’t hear it they wonder if you’re still alive.
So I’ve got nothing against Mayor DeCicco-Best for her appropriately conventional speech Thursday morning. Critical as I may be, it’s all for the sake making things better. It isn’t that I expect more, it’s that I believe we can improve.
Aside from the loose rhetoric in the speech itself, two other weakness stood out. The first, which I already mentioned in the last post, was the assortment of contradictory aims and ideals: transit and parking, development and heritage, economy and environment, etc. The second, sort of in the same spirit as the first, is that London seems to fall right in the middle of everything.
That was something I was beginning to allude to in an earlier post in this local “series” (see the comments especially): London is the Middlest City in Canada – in danger of slipping through the cracks. We’re big enough to have big-city problems but too small to be on everyone’s radar. We’re just close enough to the Toronto megaregion to fall under its penumbral influence and rely on its economy, and Torontonians often assume we’re pretty much like Hamilton — “only a couple Go Train stops past Oakville” — but we’re not quite close enough to enjoy the full benefits of proximity, such as easy commutability. You might say London is to Toronto what Canada is to the US: as far as the rest of Canada is concerned, Londoners are just polite, pleasant, somewhat bland Torontonians.
I’ve actually thought a lot about both the “Canadian identity” and the “London identity” for a number of years. So far I haven’t been able to decode the DNA of either of them. They’re both tricky to formulate. We tend to distinguish ourselves by being indistinctly… normal.
Now there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. Someone has to be normal — and average is underrated.
We don’t lack symbols or a sense of community, but we do lack enduring zeal. And that’s exactly the way I like it; that’s why I keep sticking around, in London, and in Canada more generally. We just want to get on with our comfortable lives, rather than having to adjust to every cycle and wave of fashion and enthusiasm and crisis. If we wanted to live life closer to the edge, we would have — each as separate individuals, or as individual families — chosen to live in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary, Vancouver, the US, or the other London. But no, we voted for this (or at least a critical plurality did), we chose to move or stay here because it is not those other places.
The word that keeps coming up to define London – the only one that I think actually applies — is “livable.” Any discussion of how to make London a great city must begin and end with that concept.
To be continued…
Pingback: Creating London’s Competitive Advantage | Brnfrnk
Pingback: London’s True Calling | B Frank