“Toronto is the most important city in Canada.”

People in Toronto — especially people around Toronto city hall — have been waiting a long time to hear these words from a federal politician. And there they are, spoken by the leader of the opposition, NDP leader Thomas Mulcair to the Star’s Christopher Hume this week. In an election year, no less.

It was part of a blitz of our city in which Mulcair pledged to put our issues on the front of the election agenda. In a flurry of broadcast and print interviews over the past week, in a speech at the convention centre on Sunday, and then in a meeting with Mayor John Tory (open John Tory's policard) on Monday, there was Mulcair, fulfilling an urbanist Toronto fantasy, talking about “permanent, stable, and predictable” funding for transit, about being a “reliable partner” in funding affordable housing, name-checking East Chinatown and Scarborough.

It’s a little something like a dream, and it’s hard not to expect we’ll all wake up from it well before the election campaign begins in earnest.

For more than a generation, those who follow Toronto’s local politics in particular and the politics of cities across the country more generally have known that the things he’s talking about are the things most needed to overcome our challenges. No other major city in North America runs a transit system like ours with the proportion of local revenues we do, and U.S. cities benefit from generous federal contributions.

City manager Joe Pennachetti spoke to me last year about the crisis in funding for operations and capital repair expenses at Toronto Community Housing and plainly said there was no conceivable way the city could handle the expenses without funding from both the provincial and federal governments — he was blunt and categorical in saying no other city in the world even tries to manage a housing portfolio like ours without upper-government dollars.

Infrastructure, childcare expenses, on and on — these are things the city simply is not equipped to fund without help from the federal government and the provincial government. And they are not frilly luxury promises, they are bare necessities for continued urban success. They need to be on the federal agenda. But in the past, they have not been.

There have always been votes to be gained by campaigning against Toronto. The way seats work, parties have found it easier to narrow-cast to certain suburbs, or to play for disproportionately represented rural seats. No one ever lost an election overestimating the antipathy of other places to Hogtown.

When, last month, the big city mayors confidently declared they planned to make urban issues a big election wedge, I admit I rolled my eyes.

I agreed with them that those issues (specifically housing, transit and jobs, they said) should be ballot-box questions, but I just couldn’t believe they would be. Taxes, terrorism, the oil fields and their economic impact, cultural clashes — those buttons the federal government hammers on in its daily talking points are the ones I thought would crowd out the things that make cities like ours worth living in.

I remain skeptical.

But Mulcair has certainly given reason to temper that skepticism with hope. He’s specific, and blunt, and his speech points line up exactly with what smart Torontonians have long identified as our priorities. If it’s a blatant play for votes in the 416 and 905, that’s also reason to hope, because it means he thinks this will be a place that can swing the election, and he further thinks the items on his list will attract the votes he needs.

Will Justin Trudeau respond in kind? His recruiting of several star candidates in Toronto — perhaps especially former Toronto city councillor Adam Vaughan — suggest a plan for a robust urban agenda, one we’re still waiting to hear about beyond platitudes. Mulcair has raised the stakes for the Liberals on what a real play for urbanist votes might look like.

Will Stephen Harper and the Conservatives take up the same challenge? Is that a hope too far?

Maybe. Or maybe not. If Toronto is to be a battleground, it is up to us, GTA voters, to define the terms of engagement.

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“Only when Toronto is strong is Canada strong,” Mulcair said in his speech on Sunday. Maybe that won’t be any party’s nationwide campaign slogan. But hearing it from a leader’s mouth is reason enough for hope.

Edward Keenan writes on city issues. ekeenan@thestar.ca . Follow: @thekeenanwire

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