Local Food : Innovation + Job News

When the minority Liberal government unveiled its draft provincial budget last week, the document lasted barely a day before being trashed: the opposition parties refused to support the government, and a snap—though widely anticipated—election was called.

Ontarians will go to the polls on June 12, but they already know a great deal about what the Liberals will be running on: that short-lived budged doubles as a convenient campaign platform. And one of its centrepiece proposals is a major employment initiative. The other parties will likely follow with their own jobs-creation strategies (we'll cover those as they are released) but in the meantime, here are the highlights of the Liberal proposal.

The Liberal government's plan centres on a $2.5 billion "jobs and prosperity fund," a new 10-year initiative that will focus on helping businesses develop internationally, and become more productive. It will also include grants to help attract new major businesses to Toronto. The money will be allocated to several sectors, including $40 million a year for food and beverage manufacturing and $20 million over four years for the increased acquisition of health products. This will be combined with other initiatives, like ongoing efforts to establish a cooperative capital markets regulator (so far British Columbia and the federal government have joined the talks).

Though NDP leader Andrea Horwath announced that her party would be voting against the budget, she specified that this reflected a general distrust of the Liberal government rather than objections to the budget itself, which is widely regarded as NDP-friendly. For their part the Progressive Conservatives characterized the Liberal plan as "corporate welfare" and say they will create jobs by lowering payroll and corporate taxes.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Ministry of Finance

A trip to Ghana in 2009 by a few self-funded Scadding Court-area teens is paying off, and in the process offering an excellent example of how rich countries can learn from poor ones.

"What we saw there were all kinds of rusted out containers where people were selling chicken, cutting hair," says Scadding Court Community Centre head Kevin Lee. "We came back to Toronto, there's so much under-utilized public space, like sidewalks that are three times the size they need to be, and on Dundas Street, economically depressed, with no eyes on the street…."

So now, there are 19 containers on Dundas just west of Bathurst, and a charette at the Scadding Court Community Centre on Tuesday brought together architects, designers, city planners, public health workers and community members to show and tell how that might be expanded into the city's first container mall.

The first container went up three years ago, very shortly after the group, of which Lee was a part, got back from Ghana. At first, it was just food, but it soon morphed into retail, including Stin Can, a bike repair shop run by two 19-year-olds, graduates of the Biz Start program who, according to Lee, were able to start up with just $2,000. (You may want to think about stopping by their container instead of your usual local.)

"What we're trying to do," Lee says, "is establish a template for the city of Toronto in terms of economic development at the grassroots level. Economic development doesn’t just mean trying to attract Google to move their head office to Toronto."

The city just found $80,000 to buy two or three new containers, according to Councillor Adam Vaughan, in whose ward the containers sit. Now they’re just waiting for a council vote on approvals, which could come as early as this week.

"You put 10 bureaucrats around a table, all it takes is one to say no to scrap things," Vaughan says from the floor of the charette. He says the original idea came from a private company who wanted to set up some containers on Queen West. Heritage Toronto nixed it, according to Vaughan, saying the only spot they could use was the parking lot at Queen and Phoebe, so the company dropped the idea.

The charette, and the community centre's central involvement, is a way, Vaughan hopes, to circumvent the usual impediments to Toronto ever having nice things. "What we're looking for here is a way to say yes."

Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Kevin Lee, Adam Vaughan