He’s a downtowner who walks to work but loves to paddle Algonquin Park.

He’s a rookie food buff hooked on the global tastes to be found in the strip malls of Scarborough.

And Meric Gertler, the newest president of the University of Toronto, is an expert on cities who is wasting no time calling for more university funding from Queen’s Park and Ottawa.

Even before being formally installed in the job Thursday, he suggested Ontario set up a special funding formula for the University of Toronto to help cover the high cost of all the research for which it is hailed around the world.

“We’re saying to the government, if you’re really serious about wanting different universities to play to their different strengths, this is our strength and you need to adjust the funding for us in a way that acknowledges that.”

Gertler, who was dean of the school’s mighty 26,000-student Faculty of Arts and Science for five years, succeeds outgoing president Dr. David Naylor, who has returned to the faculty of medicine.

The University of Toronto, which does more research than any campus in Canada, has long sought more federal money to cover the indirect costs of research, such as heating and lighting the labs, tech support and library services.

“For every dollar we bring in for research, we have to spend 50 cents of our own budget to support that research and we only get 17 cents from the feds — that’s the lowest in country,” said the 58-year-old urban planner, who has won acclaim for his research on how innovation helps city economies.

Moreover, Gertler warned Ontario’s plan to stop schools from charging a full “flat fee” for as little as 60 per cent of a course load — expected within weeks — would cost U of T $16 million a year in lost income that it will struggle to replace.

“Where would we find $16 million? It’s really not obvious,” Gertler said.

“We sail so close to the wind financially — we have so little room to manoeuvre because research is expensive — that if they raise the flat fee threshold to 80 per cent (as rumoured) we would lose something like $16 million a year in a direct hit to our bottom line,” said Gertler. “That’s a big gulp for us. In order to maintain our global ranking, we have to hire the best from around the world, which means competing in global labour markets.”

Gertler says the flat fee system did encourage students to take more courses at a time, which he called a good thing because they could graduate more quickly. He said the fees did not cause a surge in financial need or drop in student marks — in fact, grades went up — nor did it cause a drop in enrolment in extracurricular activities.

Nine of Ontario’s 22 universities charge full price for less than a full course load, but U of T is the only one to charge full fees for as little as 60 per cent, something the arts and science faculty introduced in 2011 as a way to help defray an annual shortfall of $5 million to $7 million at the time, caused by lean grants and a recession that knocked endowments by as much as 20 per cent.

While the university has rebounded to a degree, partly from taking in more international students who pay almost five times as much tuition as locals, Queen’s Park will not let universities raise fees by more than 3 per cent a year now, instead of 5 per cent, which Gertler says is costing his school tens of millions of dollars.

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“We would love to see classes get smaller rather than larger, but our progress on that front will be stalled if we are behind the eight ball,” said Gertler, who came to U of T 30 years ago from Harvard, where he earned his PhD.

The money from flat fees helps enrich students’ experience through things like research opportunities for undergrads and a grant that pays for small classes to study abroad for a week, said Gertler, which helps students who can’t afford to take a semester or even summer course abroad.

Like all university presidents, he will spend time fundraising. The university has set a record goal of $2 billion. It has already raised $1.35 billion of this sum. Most of the money goes toward student scholarships, said Gertler; the university hands out some $150 million a year in financial aid.

One thing Gertler regrets not having time for is teaching, something he “absolutely adores.” The father of two adult children is married to the director of marketing for the Canada’s National Ballet School.