ECDC Meeting July 4, 2024: transcribed excerpts

Economic and Community Development Committee Meeting. July 4, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPhWuR9kv3I

Transcription of excerpts of E.C.14.1 A Framework to Advance Inclusive Economic Development in Toronto

Counc. Fletcher: I’m not sure that we have the broad focus that we might need for ensuring that all our big city jobs are inclusive. So I’m looking at parks forestry and recreation where local community hiring should be a focus, I’m looking at Toronto community housing where local hiring should be a focus. Size matters. We have a very large purchasing opportunity, that includes in our hiring policy, that includes in our deployment policy, that includes our community benefits policy. So inclusive economic development is a very broad palate. How much farther do we need to go in ensuring that we tick all of those boxes and put them front and center?

Pat Tobin (general manager of Economic Development and Culture): yes, this report suggests that the city should use all levers at its disposal, be it land use planning, regulatory policy environment, taxation, granting, policy making and procurement in order to deliver a more equitable environment for Toronto. That has included an increasing focus on the city as employer,…My colleague Mary Madigan Lee, chief people officer is here with me and maybe she could expand on the city’s efforts towards more equitable hiring.

Mary Madigan Lee (chief of HR): The city continues to try to do outreach and inclusive hiring as much as possible. One of our endeavors right now is to properly and adequately have data that we can track, and integrate into our hiring processes, audit our interviews and interview structures, and very consciously making sure that we are a proper reflection of the community of Toronto.

Counc.Fletcher: In the past, in North York, the hiring was so local. The recreation hiring, it was a policy of North York. I don’t think that survived. It’s got to do with bringing people up that live there. Is that not going to be part of this recommended policy?

Pat Tobin: yes it will be. In a couple of examples, this report proposes a framework that would be applied at a local level such as you’re describing, through the encouragement of community development plans,… As another note, our colleague in Toronto Employment Social Services, who helped prepare this report, will be doing more targeted analysis on workforce development to try to inform the development of such plans.

Counc. Fletcher: I don’t think there’s a reason to wait for this, I’m just going to ask Mr.Dayton about the hiring policy for recreation. And what it currently is, and the percentage of local hires and local deployment for those areas. Do you have those numbers?

Howie Dayton, general manager of Parks, Forestry and Recreation: we don’t have those numbers currently, that would be something that we would follow up with. Certainly we have local hiring initiatives…

Counc. Fletcher: but you don’t track it.

Howie Dayton: that hasn’t been …

Counc. Fletcher: you don’t track it.

Howie Dayton: we are going to implement a methodology to understand what our sort of local hiring impact is.

Counc. Fletcher: I don’t think it’s a framework, it’s a transaction, it’s something that would be done right away and not wait. So I’m going to ask you to prepare that, and not going forward – let’s look at your history in hiring. Maybe it’s great. Unfortunately we have no idea.

Howie Dayton: we’re happy to do that.

Counc. Carroll: so you know, I think the reason we’re nervous when we see the word framework is that we set a framework, and then the framework seems to take two to three years for implementation. So we have an outline here of what’s going to happen, but do you have in your mind a timeline, for instance tracking local hires, are there target and goals of a time when you expect to be better informed about these things? What’s the overall timeline of getting this in place so that we can say the framework is actually functioning?

Pat Tobin: The letter talks about the deferral to November 26. Over the course of that time, we’ll be able to work on multiple fronts including consultation with community organizations who do the work on the ground, of generating more inclusive economic development. We’ll also be able to refine the approach to metrics, and it will allow us to look at the city as employer to use another tool to advance inclusive economic development.

Counc. Carroll: if you’re developing partnerships, the framework will turn into more of a – where you would start to implement a partnership. I’m asking because when you go to start to animate something and get something going a neighbourhood and it’s going to lead to some leadership and some employment, how soon are we going to end up with a road map here? So we’re not just all ping-ponging around trying to figure out – can we get an actual road map when we say, how do we make sure that the people who need those opportunities get there? By deferring it, do we get that kind of clarity so that there’s a real roadmap that not only councillors but businesses and NGOs in neighbourhoods can begin to access and use it?

Pat Tobin: the deferral will allow for work on a few fronts. One is clearer accountability among divisions, which was requested, the second was a reliable method to track those longitudinally using a credible third party, and the third would be more informed by existing good practices in community.

Counc. Carroll: And then one more question: if we’re going to defer this until November, we’ll also see the broader Economic Action Plan coming forward and it will have a series of future actions. So can the actions here be sort of folded in, so it becomes clear that that also informs the broader plan?

Pat Tobin: the first recommendation of this report encourages the action plan to use this framework.

Pat Tobin (in response to some questions from Counc. Bravo): Yes, this report is really concerned about creating greater opportunities for those 35% of Toronto’s residents who live with median household income of under $30,000 in this city, and in order to get there, working with organizations that work with people with lived experience of economic precarity. That’s an important input to this work.

Counc. Carroll: it’s such a big piece. It really does have to be felt across the broad thing known as economic development, and that’s hard to do. The risk was just that it would be narrowed down to being a community benefit plan. In fact, it should be a mindset.

Counc. Fletcher: Our economic plan has to be not just about attracting business, it has to be about lifting up everybody in the city. We do have that opportunity. It’s adding a different lens. It’s a really exciting moment to set the stage, because once it’s been set, it will be something that we’ll be able to work with, and develop over many many years. Councillor Carroll said, we all get the heebie-jeebies when we hear about a framework, because by the time we start implementing it, guess what, we have a new framework. That’s the history of how we do things. Or we forgot something, so we have to come back and put it in. I just want to have really clear inputs. And when I asked about Parks, and I’ll leave that with you, Madam Chair, we need to be analyzing what we have done. What’s the local hiring process, where we hire thousands of people. That’s PF and R. What’s the local hiring process where there’s 80,000 tenants, and that’s TCHC. What’s the local hiring process for outreach? I hate it when we only talk about the future. Let’s look at what we’ve done. Maybe it wasn’t great, but this will give us a good picture. Maybe some places are working really well – so there’s a benchmark for everybody else. If we don’t do that, then we’re all starting at zero. If we say we’re starting at zero and we have to start finding things out now, that’s a very bad position. We should be here with that type of information already. How many community benefits agreements have we had, how many new jobs have we had. This year, when we got the first report on Regent Park, and the number of jobs. TCHC hadn’t been tracking, actually. We had to go in and there was a staff report, from our staff, that was counting CPR, 320 people having received CPR training -- somehow [counted] as a community benefit from Regent park redevelopment. I think we need to say, well what is a community benefit? It’s not something that you would do in any community, where you would get certain kinds of training. So let’s get this right. Let’s have a great framework, but let’s also populate that framework with information that we already have. We’re trying to take what we’ve done, check what it is, see where it’s worked, see where we’re lacking, work from data, not from our future, and get this really robust. I don’t think anybody needs to wait til November, to initiate some of these things, Madam Chair.

Counc. Bravo: I can’t think of anything that’s more powerful than looking at all the ways that we can remove barriers to people who want and deserve economic inclusion in the city….We have a responsibility to use every tool available to us to make sure that we’re getting out of the way of people… ….I think of six things that the city does: hiring, so work force is really important as we’ve heard; what we buy – procurement – is crucial; the contracting of services we enable through licensing and other means – something that we hadn’t really considered up to now, and perhaps that’s a future piece of work; land use planning is absolutely essential; and participation. Community economic development and community development require that the people we’re trying to lift up, or get out of the way of, define the problem, look for solutions that would support them, and then are able to sit alongside the decision makers to monitor progress……I think it is important to do the inventory of what we’re doing already, and that will develop baselines, and we will see eventually that there is uneven progress in different parts of the city. With that baseline we can identify really good practices, and those practices can turn into goals.