The keynote speaker for the event was author and journalist, Doug Saunders from the Globe and Mail. Saunders challenged the audience to look into the future to consider how our policy and city-building decisions in the past and today have far reaching impacts. As planners and policy makers working in the GGH, we talk about Toronto’s ever-increasing growth. However, Saunders shifted this narrative explaining that approximately half of the neighbourhoods in the GTHA area actually are experiencing declining population. Saunders took the audience through a history lesson of how past decisions led us to a region with a relatively low population density. Saunders showed photos of Toronto in the early 1900s showing half of Torontonians living in precarious housing and no one was predicting urban population growth to the scale that it has reached today.

We are experiencing uneven population growth, not helped by the protection of the yellowbelt, and our stable neighbourhoods are hollowing out. Areas of low population density are inaccessible to population growth and have low housing potential. In stable neighbourhoods across the city, one-third of households only have one person living in them. Saunders argued that it isn’t overcrowding that is causing congestion that many at first glance may think, but it comes back to low population density. While talking about low density in the yellowbelt, Saunders asked anyone who lives in the yellowbelt to raise their hand and many hands in the room raised in response. But Saunders described a generational shift that’s happening — people no longer see tri-plexes next door as weird but as housing for their kids, who can’t afford any. So it appears people are becoming more welcoming to the idea of loosening up the yellowbelt. Through shifting attitudes and more a more flexible development process, Saunders believes that Toronto can be on the right track.

Saunders told the audience that Toronto needs more growth to compete economically and globally, but we also need to properly plan for it. Toronto won’t keep continuing to get lucky so we need to be smart and plan. It was then that we heard from a panel of seven of the Chief Planners in attendance.

The seven Chiefs were happy to expound the virtues of not just Toronto’s moment but other municipalities as well. Alain Pinard from the City of Kitchener said “not only do we have a diverse economy, we have diverse types of urban areas. Yes, we have a large urban downtown in Toronto, but it’s not the only one! Within the last year, the construction volume in downtown Kitchener was $1B.”

Leslie Woo, Chief Development Officer at Metrolinx, recognized that our region knows how to build great places, in particular in advancing the integration of transportation and land use. The City of Hamilton’s Steve Robichaud appealed to all planners in the room when he explained that we have had to shift from thinking about standard of living to quality of life issues. The City of Hamilton is working on interesting things and it’s no surprise to see that Robichaud has a focus on complete streets and public realm improvements.

Gregg Lintern, Chief Planner at the City of Toronto, left the audience with a question of what kind of challenge we are going to leave the next generation to deal with? Challenged by Lintern to think about the future and Saunders’ warnings of continuing a low population density city, leaves us to consider how we are going to be better city builders. Attending this event was energizing all the way from meeting chiefs from across the region, having a keynote about population demographics and talking about Toronto’s moment.