Welcome throwback to a time of hope

When Premier Doug Ford and Mayor Olivia Chow stood together at Queen’s Park early last week to announce a preliminary new funding deal for Toronto, it seemed — beyond the specifics of capital and operating dollars and federal contingencies and so on — to be the turning of a page in the story of Toronto politics. An end, maybe, to the drawn-out debates over the Gardiner Expressway that have featured prominently in our politics for at least two decades. Enough dollars to provide a tiny bit of breathing room from the suffocating budgetary pressure that has overwhelmed any talk of political progress at city hall for so long.

It’s not some happy ending, and may not even mark the start of a whole new chapter. But it did feel like a fresh page, with some fresh possibilities.

Which might have offered a flashback, for some of us, to a time two decades ago when a sense of unexpected optimism flushed into a Toronto political scene that had then been long dominated by budget pressure from provincial downloading, thrown into chaos by forced amalgamation, and made grimy by the outright corruption of the MFP scandal and the familycompact-style by-the-lobbyists, for-the-lobbyists culture that allowed it to happen.

Someone at city hall recently asked me why I remembered the years of David Miller’s mayoralty fondly, and my answer was that among other achievements, he spoke about governing Toronto as building a “magnificent city” in a way that made Torontonians — or a bunch of them, anyway — believe it was possible.

That ability to inspire hope and belief in the capacity of the city to do great things only seems more valuable in retrospect, after more than a decade of penny-pinching austerity as the dominant governing ideology.

It’s possible I look at that time in Toronto history through rose-coloured glasses because I was younger then and at the start of building my career and had not yet seen several cycles of the self-defeating idiocy that is a recurring theme in Toronto government repeat themselves.

But either way, that optimism of Miller’s election era is inseparable in my mind from the launch of Spacing Magazine, a grassroots independent publication that was equal parts do-it-yourself civic activism advice, shameless Toronto boosterism, and optimistic but detailed policy criticism.

Dedicated to public space issues — a topic area that includes parks and streets and transit, city planning, urban design and other items, the magazine was accompanied by fun merchandising (notably the subway-station lapel pins that David Miller always wore) and often boozy events that mixed an indierock vibe with policy seminar concerns. In a way, and as much as it is possible, it kind of made city politics cool.

On Saturday night, Spacing celebrated its 20th anniversary with a party at 401 Richmond St. — launching a retrospective issue of the magazine, a book collecting some of the best essays to appear in the magazine and a retrospective exhibit at the UrbanSpace Gallery of archival material.

In evaluating the magazine’s history, I can’t claim to be an objective outsider — I started that way, but through my admiration for the publication, I became friends and collaborators with many of the founders and staff, including my fellow Star columnist Shawn Micallef, Spacing creative director Matt Blackett, and fellow founders Dale Duncan, Todd Irvine and Dylan Reid. I’ve worked with them, and hung out with them. Two of my own essays are included in the new retrospective book.

But it’s fair to say that even as our collective city politics grew less optimistic over the years, Spacing continued to grow and thrive in ways that few media outlets have been able to in the digital age.

The merchandising arm turned into a retail store on Richmond Street, the magazine spawned a website where John Lorinc’s politics column is a must-read for city hall watchers, the gang has published numerous books and continues its special events programming.

Through years of austerity, scandal, boredom, and endless debate about the Scarborough subway and the Gardiner, Spacing has managed to keep the flame of optimism alive.

After the past few years, after pandemic-induced budget shortfalls and community disconnection, after service cuts and punishing housing costs and pilot projects left to rot, and while potholes grow deeper and more numerous — while the whole project of building the city seems to have lacked hope that a better future is even possible, it seems like a throwback to that early 2000s sense of optimism is especially needed. And especially welcome.

Chow’s good-vibes election campaign seemed to channel a bit of that spirit. Her announcement with Ford (of all people) last week seemed to let in a sliver of sunlight to illuminate it. And 20 years after it was born as an avatar of pure potential, Spacing is still here to see it (and provide a detailed look at the public space implications at, for instance, Ontario Place).

I’ll take all the opportunities I can to celebrate, these days. And this past week, we finally seemed to have had some things to celebrate.

On Saturday, Spacing Magazine celebrated its 20th anniversary. It’s fair to say that even as our collective city politics grew less optimistic over the years, Spacing continued to thrive in ways that few media outlets have been able to in the digital age