A council’s reach should exceed its grasp, or what’s a heaven for?

That’s a small rewrite of the line from Robert Browning’s poem mulling over the artistic aspirations of Renaissance painter Andrea Del Sarto, who wishes he had the abilities of Raphael. It’s a fair description Toronto City Council’s grandiose plan to reduce and hopefully eradicate poverty in Toronto. 

The poverty reduction strategy is a blockbuster report laying out a 20-year plan to deal with the fact than one in four children in Toronto live in poverty. Council didn’t adopt one or two straightforward actions that would positively impact children, but instead took the highfalutin Versailles route: it endorsed no less than 71 recommendations, some asking for more reports, some establishing committees and roundtables to monitor change.

Council didn’t agree to spending any additional money: funds for 2016 would have to await budget deliberations, so nothing could be done right now about the poverty problem except adopting the report to act in the future. 

Some might find comfort in the 20-year time frame. What can’t be funded this year might be put in the budget for next year or the year after. Given the fact that many councillors have already spent more than a decade in public office, they might even be here in 2035 to assess what, if anything, has changed as a result of this plan.

But the mayor and a majority of councillors have already made it clear they aren’t about to act precipitously. At a council meeting in November, staff recommended that the city establish a program to assist homeowners to replace lead water pipes that are considered dangerous to health. 

The program would have loaned money to homeowners for the cost of the work, then recover the loan through the property tax bill, all at no cost to the city. 

Council refused to endorse this program, saying homeowners should go to the bank and get a loan, and when some councillors pointed out that low-income homeowners would have trouble getting a bank loan, staff were told to speak kindly to banks to see if they would be more compliant. 

Mayor John Tory spoke at some length to make it clear he did not think the city should be lending this no-cost assistance to these owners to deal with a public health hazard.

I suspect the poverty reduction strategy is all talk, no action. When it comes to spending half a billion dollars to keep the eastern end of the Gardiner Expressway standing, council had no qualms about that sum. When it came to spending an extra billion dollars on a subway route in Scarborough that served fewer riders than the less costly route, council agreed to the larger sum. 

Reducing poverty among children? Council prefers to endorse recommendations for the future than to take action.

An alternate poverty reduction route could be very modest. Recognizing the studies indicating the benefits to kids of recreation programs, council could make all city-run recreation programs for kids and youth free. The cost would probably be less than $10 million a year.

That was the policy of the former City of Toronto for almost a century. But when the mega-city was established, the councillors from North York, Scarborough and Etobicoke were outraged at these free programs and imposed a charge. 

Or council could get more serious. 

The former city and its board of education had agreed in 1973 on a shared use policy where city staff ran after-school and weekend recreation programs in schools, with the city picking up the staff costs and the board paying the facility costs. It was a terrific way of using existing community resources well and providing opportunities for kids in the school they knew. Premier Mike Harris put on end to these arrangements.

Former Mayor David Crombie has been pushing for some years for a “hub policy,” which would use schools better, and there is now talk among schools officials that they want to go that route as well.

This approach is within reach, not beyond the city’s grasp. 

If city council wanted to address poverty issues directly and quickly, it would forget Versailles and instead agree to fund its share of these arrangements in 2016.