Arber Puci's Q&A from candidate debate

 The City of Toronto’s Municipal Government considers many different aspects when making decisions about what can be built where. For example, the city needs to ensure enough new houses, condos, and apartments are approved to keep up with population growth and the demand for housing. But this development can also bring challenges — it can change the character of neighbourhoods too quickly, or make it hard for infrastructure such as schools, streets, water pipes, parks, and transit to keep up. 

The City of Toronto’s Municipal Government provides housing assistance, or social housing, which offers rent support to people who need help paying their monthly rent. The last couple of years thousands of new units have been built as affordable rental units as part of the current Poverty Reduction Plan. We need to increase awareness and accessibility to these affordable rental units so people in need can apply and utilize them. 

I believe Housing affordability should not be a privilege but a right. Toronto rent prices have increased to an all-time high with no end in sight. Inflation is making everyone’s life way more expensive. I support rent control and maintaining low property taxes for those who own. I am not going to tell you lets freeze the taxes, cause our inflation is at 10% a year, which makes it impossible, but we have to cap the increase.

I think we are at a crossroad at the moment when it comes to housing. If we don’t do anything with all the inflation that is occurring we will drive more people to the streets. We already have tents in our parks and they are increasing. This is a significant issue for many residents living close by those parks. 

I am not going to stand here as say that I have a magic solution to the housing issues that can solve this issue instantly, because its impossible. This will take some thoughtful planning from a smart council we put in place which can understand and relate to what families are going through. I have vast experience with planning for big projects and real-life experience that I can apply to developing these solutions. I am running for council not for a career in politics, but to make a change in my community.

 The City of Toronto has planned to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2040, faster than the original target of 2050. At the moment we are very far from it. 18 years might seem like a long time, but working in major infrastructure project throughout my life, I can tell you it’s a short time to make significant infrastructure changes.

For the city to reach carbon neutrality, the first steps are:

· Improve public transportation to ensure it is fast and efficient with continued investment in public transit. We are in this mess because for 30 years from the 80s to 2010s there were no significance investment in the public transportation

· Increase access and improve infrastructure and safety for pedestrians, cyclists, and all new forms of carbon free transportation.  

· Increase local renewable energy by increasing its compatibility with current buildings. Making it easier to install solar panels and installing battery power banks to conserve energy. 

· Boosting EV infrastructure throughout the city. Making it easier to install a charging station or finding shared charging stations. Currently there is major hurdles if you want to install a charger in a condo.

· Provide incentives for people to drive electric vehicles through the town to help lower the pollution and noise.

· Expand and improve the park system. Achieve a good distribution of the urban forest within the city, increasing trees and green space where it is most needed. We all know how efficient trees are on removing carbon dioxide and reducing noise. Trees it’s a proven barrier of reducing city noise.

The new council, we would need to make carbon net zero a priority otherwise will definitely not be able to meet our target and lower the pollution. This is a global effort but its starts first here at home.

The Toronto Police Services has approximately 7,600 full- and part-time members. The Toronto Police Service is the largest municipal police service in Canada. The City funds the Toronto Police Service, which receives approximately 10% of the City of Toronto’s annual budget. This is a significant portion of tax payer’s money and we need to ensure they perform work to the highest standards.

This Ward has seen a large increase in crime and violence year after year. More focus and emphasis is required from the city to curb the crime. Each neighborhood in the ward needs a community safety program.

The City of Toronto Police has acknowledged systemic discrimination within its policing. This includes the need for reform to ensure public safety for all Toronto residents. This requires systematic review and continues improvement.

The police force and the city need to focus on the following to improve policing and support our communities:

· Reduce Vulnerability – There is a large number of people with substance addiction problems in the city. This can lead to mental health issues that makes this individual vulnerable to self harm and crime. 

· Reduce Violence – we need to prevent and reduce gun violence, interpersonal violence, gender-based violence and domestic violence through strategic and coordinated efforts across communities.

· Advance Truth and Reconciliation - improve community safety and well-being for Indigenous Peoples.

· Promote Healing and Justice – Throughout our history there has been dark patches where our society including the policy force has discriminated people because of their colour gender and sexual preferences. Even though it might be hard we as a society need to promote healing between the police force and these community groups. I believe that division in society does not help the community. There always are going to be issues and challenges but we need to work together to fix them.

As our city and ward grows, more people are using our sidewalks, roads, buses, streetcars, and subways to get around. The city approves where offices, homes, and stores get built. Over time, this can have a big impact on how we get around. Locating more jobs and homes close to major transit stations decreases public transit commuting times.

We need to be better at planning for the future and have a council that is proactive and not reactive.

We need to improve our public transportation to ensure it is fast and efficient and improving infrastructure and safety for pedestrians, cyclists and all new forms of carbon free travel. Our current public transportation severely lacks compared to other major cities of the world. It is proven that if public transportation commuting time is less than driving time, people are more likely start taking public transportation. At this moment we are far from it. It takes 3 times longer to take public transportation than drive in Toronto. The province has released their long-term plans for the public transportation infrastructure, Eglinton line and Ontario line. It’s important now that we know where the new lines are going to be, we can plan better for the future by building communities near public transportation to lower the commute and decrease traffic and noise pollution. 

Spadina Fort York Ward is the liveliest Ward of all Toronto. Every week thousands of Torontonians and tourists visit the lively neighborhoods of the Spadina-Fort York Ward this causes a lot of noise and pollution. Noise is everywhere in a lively city, but it should not affect our life. Noise is constantly being generated from bars, patios, cars, construction, and people. Noise is one of the main issues for the resident of our wards. 

There is a lot of cities that have implemented very effective regulations that have greatly reduced noise and traffic. We need to learn from what these cities have done and implement them in Toronto. Some of this effort include installing low noise pavements, reducing driving speed, creating pedestrian only areas and promoting EV car use.

Definition of what art is has greatly change in the last couple of decades, it’s not only acting, painting and sculpting. It has expanded to the digital word, people that make the graphics for movies and video games, the people that design cool furniture. It is a very broad industry now and that is what it is an industry on its own.

Arts and culture are indispensable to a city and its economy. Talent is attracted to culture-rich cities. Businesses want to locate where they can attract the best people. Actively supporting our cultural industries creates a circle where talent and investment come together to create economic sustainability. 

Toronto’s arts and culture impact is global — from the music of Drake and The Weekend, to the filming of “Schitt’s Creek”, “Kim’s Convenience,” and the Toronto Caribbean Carnival, the largest cultural festival in North America.

Unfortunately, COVID-19 has hit Toronto’s arts industries especially hard, with mandated health and safety restrictions limiting travel and cancelling public gatherings. Therefore, ongoing support from the City of Toronto, private sector and not-for-profit partners is required to bring the artistic scene to pre-covid levels.

What would I recommend to maintain and increase Toronto’s artistic and cultural scenery is to:

· Create an arts-focused, fund-matching program for private foundations and major donors to to open spaces to a new generation of talent.

· Work with community partners, to create training and development programs for the arts to help to develop skills for the new generation that align with the skills the market needs.

· Advance opportunities for cultural engagement across the city- There are many artists that live in the Fort York Spadina Ward who should be able to create art throughout the city and become part of Toronto’s landmark.

· Provide affordable spaces for culture across the city - Finding affordable creative space is an issue in Toronto, lets face it, unknown artist don’t get paid that well, they can barely afford their rent in their house – we need to ensure there is an adequate supply of affordable spaces in Toronto’s cultural scene, where these artists can grow.

Improving access to social service changes the way cities and regions grow and increase opportunities for people. The satisfaction of residents regarding the quality of available services such as healthcare, education, social services affect the perception of the residents on how the government responds to their needs. And as we have seen recently, there is a great number of social services such as healthcare, park and road maintenance that really lack investment and action. Trust in local governments is affected by the availability and quality of public services and whether citizens perceive the access to services be fair. And I think people have lost their trust in the government.

The way local services are planned and financed have an impact on the quality of life in a city. Inflation is growing rapidly making everything more expensive, including the cost of maintaining the city. By increasing the taxes to make the deficit we are causing more strain to the residents without making the city better. Now it’s time to have a smart council in place where they can manage the money properly and find ways to get more value for money then before while keeping the taxes low. Therefore, using money where its needed the most and not investing on a 200 million dollar summer island bridge.

As an engineer I believe in numbers. At the moment there is no way to measure how our social services are performing, no metrics no numbers. How can we improve something if we don’t know how we are performing? The technology to track this exists but the willingness of the government is not there. We need to set up a transparent way that measure how are social services such as healthcare, transportation, education, homelessness, garbage pickup is performing year after year so we can identify were we fall short and improve upon it. 

Technology has made everything more accessible, our city hall needs to adapt and make their services accessible and transparent to everyone in the city.