Why does it feel as if Toronto is being punished? And for what?

If the city’s worst sins are that it supports public transit, uses libraries, values creativity and holds progressive views, surely these are not capital offenses? Some might even argue these are Toronto’s best features, with, of course, its much lauded multiculturalism and spirit of tolerance.

Yet everywhere, even City Hall, the city finds itself berated and abused. We are bike-riding pinkos who combine arrogance with a big sense of entitlement.

Anti-urbanism has always been a feature of the Canadian federation, which treats cities as a necessary evil. They are the junior level of government, not fully mature and certainly not to be trusted. The fact cities deliver something like 80 percent of the services citizens expect gets lost in the rhetoric, as does the fact the overwhelming majority of Canadians live in towns and cities.

It has become a cliché to point out that for the first time in human history, more than half the species now inhabits cities, but the world is overwhelmingly urban, nowhere more so than in Canada.

So why the gap between policy and reality? Why so much hostility on the part of the senior levels of government in Ottawa and Queen’s Park?

There’s no simple answer, other than to say that not only have Canadians not held leaders to account, they have rewarded their anti-urbanism.

This may satisfy the demands of some misguided national myth about the Great White North, but it doesn’t bode well for a country whose growth, if not prosperity, relies overly on immigration, natural resources and trade with the fast failing U.S.

The knowledge economy about which we hear so much remains the exception rather than the rule. Outside the Kitchener/Waterloos and Torontos, there’s precious little going on. And much of the progress on creating a renewable energy sector could well be reversed if the Tim Hudak Tories are elected in October. The Stephen Harper Tories have never been interested in the environment, let alone the green economy.

It seems the traditional urban/rural divide has morphed into an urban/suburban antagonism. As former Ontario premier Mike Harris discovered, the people who support the new hard-line conservative politicians are those who feel left out of Canada’s nascent urban revolution.

(The exception, of all places, is Calgary, which last year elected a forward-looking outsider and academic as its mayor.)

By now the New Deal for Cities is a distant memory, as is any sense that the federal government bears some responsibility for urban Canada. Ottawa abandoned social housing as easily as Queen’s Park did transit.

Interesting though that the federal stimulus package, intended to keep Canada’s fragile economy lurching along, was primarily focused on cities. That’s where we are.

But keeping in mind what lies ahead in the coming age of environmental degradation and resource depletion, one might have expected a bit more concern about Canadian cities. In the future, they will be the battleground where Canada wins or loses the fight to remain viable. The lack of government commitment to, let alone investment in, our urban centres will leave the country at an enormous disadvantage. The public transit deficit alone has already reached a point where it keeps us from being fully competitive. And that will only get worse.

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In the meantime, civic politics has been turned into a backwards all-night burlesque where audience members do the entertaining while the performers watch and wait. But sooner or later it will be their turn to take the stage.

Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca