Crime-ridden, sprawling, and underserved—accurate or not, Scarborough has a bad reputation. City councillor Norm Kelly is out to change that, using research conducted by UTSC co-op students Kathy Chan and Dorinda So.
The 68-page Fair Share Scarborough took four months of full-time work to complete, and it’s attracting more attention than your average term paper. The report addresses the perception that the largest former city amalgamated into the City of Toronto 10 years ago “is not receiving its fair share of the City’s services.” Chan and So’s findings have been debated at a Scarborough Community Council meeting, and covered by the Toronto Star, as well as Scarborough’s community newspapers.
Assessing 10 city services, from libraries to policing, transit to wastewater services, Chan and So found that Scarborough receives its fair share of children’s services, long-term care, roads and transportation, and social housing, but classified Scarborough’s share of other services as neither fair or unfair, but “uncertain.”
A long-time supporter of amalgamation, Kelly was positively gleeful. While emphasizing that the report found no underfunded services, he also referred to “funding gaps” he blamed on pre-megacity councillors.
“The interesting thing that I found was where there were service gaps or funding gaps they were all in areas formerly controlled by the city of Scarborough,” he said. “So don’t point to the city and say, ‘We’re not getting our fair share.’ That’s what you brought to the city.”
Chan and So are both fourth-year management students with some background in statistical analysis and previous co-op experience. So has also worked for the federal government. Still, neither student had much practical knowledge of city government when they started.
“We had to learn everything from the basics,” Chan explained. “We had so many interviews with city staff, just to have an idea of what actual city operations are like on a daily basis, in order to get a feel for what it’s really like.”
Chan and So were supposed to compare pre- and post-amalgamation services, but that got complicated.
“We couldn’t do that because of the lack of data,” said So. “So we just did an overall snapshot of today, in comparison to the rest of Toronto.” Even within the snapshot, many services were rated uncertain—for example, Scarborough has fewer police officers per resident than the rest of the city, but it also has a lower crime rate. Scarborough has fewer community centres than the rest of Toronto, but they tend to be larger.
And like most reports, Fair Share Scarborough will soon be out of date. “There are so many plans on the way to improve the service level in Scarborough,” said Chan. “For example, they’re building a new library in the city centre, and they’re renovating other libraries.”
