Anthony Perruzza lives with his family in North York and has over twenty years of experience as a politician. He was first elected as a Toronto School Board Trustee for one term in 1985. He was then elected as a City Councillor in 1988 and in 1990, he ran provincially as an MPP under the New Democratic Government. He came back as a City Councillor in 2006 where he remains the Councillor for the Humber River-Black Creek community. At the time of this interview (2019), Perruzza serves as the Poverty-Reduction Advocate with a strong commitment to reducing poverty in the city.
Please start by telling me a bit about yourself.
My family immigrated to Canada when I was almost nine years old. We settled near Weston Road just south of Finch Avenue on a street called Saint Lucie Drive. I started going to Gulfstream Public School and later transferred to St. Jude Catholic School because the local Priest at St. Jude's said to my mother, “You’re Catholic and your son is going to a public school – why is that? He should be coming here.” So, they moved me over. None of us understood it at the time but it had to do with taxes. The Catholic School Board had a very insistent campaign aimed at getting Catholic kids into the Catholic school system because the more kids that were enrolled, the more taxes the Board got. If you were going into the Catholic School Board system, your property taxes were already being directed into that education system as well.
We started out renting my uncles’ basement on Saint Lucie Drive. My father was a carpenter and my mother worked at a local potato factory on Rivalda Road. She would bring home lots of french fries! I grew up being a bit of a caregiver for my younger siblings, one sister and two brothers, because I helped take care of them while my folks were at work.
I remember one of my first experiences when I was a kid was sitting in the back of my fathers Chevrolet and we were driving along Finch when they were just building the San Romanoway buildings at Jane and Finch. I specifically remember looking at 10 San Romanoway, the one right on the corner, and they were kind of like halfway done the concrete construction, and my father said to me, “Wouldn’t this be a great building to live in?” I just thought to myself, yes! My father was looking for opportunities for us to move out of my uncle’s basement and move into something a little more permanent and our own.
When I was leaving grade eight at St. Jude's, my language skills began to flourish. I remember my teachers encouraging my parents, who didn’t understand the system at the time, to send me to a school that was offering general and basic level programs because it would be too difficult for me to succeed otherwise. Back then, we didn’t have the kinds of supports that we do now.
I remember the first couple of years in the elementary school system – grades four, five and a little bit of six, I would sit at the back of the class and try to follow along. Nobody was asking me, “Do you get this?” or “If you don’t understand, we’ll find you some extra help.” As it turned out, when I graduated in grade eight, I didn’t end up going to a school with basic and general level programs.
I was a fairly decent young athlete and I ended up going to St. Basil-the-Great College School, which only offered advance level courses. Quite frankly, to this day, I’m not really sure how I got into that school because they had a grade test admission policy that I believe, exceeded my capacity at the time. I never had any relatives who had gone to that school and I didn’t fit any of their standard criteria, but I ended up going there.
I started delivering newspapers when I was 10 or 11 and moved on to help out at a hardware store by the time I was 12 or 13. Then I jumped ship and went to work at a local Pizzeria because they offered me more money. In addition to weekends, I worked there Thursdays and Fridays after school. Between the ages of 14 and 17, I was going to school, working basically full-time hours and looking after my siblings because my parents were not as available until later on once my mother started doing shift work. She would work at night and be home during the day.
I had made the honour roll a few times before graduating high school, and I got to choose which University I wanted to go to. I ended up going to York University. As a university student, I began thinking that the system needs to change and that’s really one of the things that prompted me to run for School Board Trustee. I wanted to help make sure that other kids wouldn’t be subjected to the same kind of short-sighted system that streamlines them into a position where their career opportunities and career choices become limited and then they're stuck in a perpetual struggle. Later as I reflected on the streamlining system at the schools, I just thought to myself, that’s plain wrong and somebody should change the public-school board. That’s what led me to become politicized. When I ran for the school board there was a group of people down at the City of Toronto and the Public-School Board, namely Rosario Marchese and Tony Silipo and these folks were working on exactly that. In fact, at one point, we got rid of the whole streamlining program although it eventually came back in a different form.
What political positions have you held over the years?
I was the Toronto Catholic School Board Trustee from 1985 and a City Councillor from 1988 to 1990. In 1990, I left the City and ran for the position of MPP and was there from 1990 – 1995. I ran against Peter Li Preti three times until I was elected back as a Toronto City Councillor in 2006.
When you were the NDP MPP during the Bob Rae era, how did you deal with the difficult decisions being made that affected our community, for example imposing austerity measures on civil service and the wage freeze?
It was a time of high need and it was very, very difficult. I thought I could off-set what the government was doing from a central perspective by focussing on delivering investments directly into our neighbourhood because I was in a position to be able to help with that. The first project that we were able to accomplish was extending the subway line from Wilson Avenue to Sheppard Avenue West. We did that within two years. We started that in early 1991, barely six or seven months into our mandate with the Ministry of Transportation at the time and we poured close to $125 million dollars into that initial expansion. We opened the subway stop in 1996 and named it the Downsview Station. That project created jobs during a time when the construction industry was hurting, and it brought much-needed investment back into the neighbourhood.
Later the government switched gears and we went through that recession exercise and the – the high dollar, high interest rates, free trade, the GST – all aspects that were beyond the provincial government's ability to control. Once we started to come out of that recession, we put packages together to try to put money back into the neighbourhoods.
The City of North York had plans to build the Yorkwoods Library Theatre, which was a type of public facility that hadn’t been built in that area before. As an MPP, I remember bringing Mel Lastman and Ann Swarbrick down to Queen’s Park. We cut a deal to make sure that the Yorkwoods Library Theatre got built and that it happened quickly. I helped do a similar deed when I became the City Councillor for Ward 8, York West, where I sped the process along to add an entire wing to Oakdale Community Centre on Grandravine Drive.
One of the other things that I did which ended up being somewhat controversial, involved Pat O’Neil, who was working for me at the time and I’m actually quite thankful that she was on my team because Pat was very sharp. I was the Parliamentary Assistant to the Minister of Colleges and Universities, to a fellow named Richard Allen. Pat had been chatting me up about a possible college consolidation in our area. Seneca College was looking for a new home and a place where they could consolidate their educational opportunities. They had a bunch of small campuses throughout the Greater Toronto Area and I remember having a conversation with the President of Seneca at the time, I think a fellow named Quinlan and they were committed to doing something like that.
Pat and I went to a breakfast meeting with Minister Richard Allen, and basically asked him for the start-up money to conduct a study to consolidate that campus. Right on the spot, over some bacon and eggs and a coffee, he said, “Sure, why not. How much money do you need?” Well, we were thinking about $250,000 would do it. He gave us the money and we hired a fellow at the time, Peter Cannif, a Principal at Seneca College, King Campus. He went out and consulted the community and people vocalized that they wanted the new campus to be located on the site directly across from Humber River Regional Hospital, Finch Site. Staff looked at the three or four other site options that were in the final report.
Seneca looked at a potential partnership with York; however, York was initially resistant to the idea. There were folks up at York that didn’t like the notion of a college campus existing on the university campus because they felt as if it diminished the university experience. I remember Peter Cannif coming into my office saying, “I’m ready to submit the final report but I need your help.” When I asked what he needed, he said, “I need you to take a position.” I asked why he would put me in that position, and he said that if we didn’t go in with a plan that’s doable, nothing would happen. I submitted a letter that became part of his final report, which I got criticized for because I was essentially supporting his recommendations to consolidate a new Seneca Campus at York University. There was a whole rationale that Peter had gone through in his final report, including the site itself, access to facilities, and the land value.
At York, there was an opportunity to be able to open a new campus site and instead of having to pay for the land, convert those moneys to York in-kind. York ended up getting a new science building instead of government funding for that land. There was a win-win associated with that; York would have a Seneca campus next door to their institution plus an additional building of their own for the value of the lands. That project took up a considerable amount of my time as an MPP because I had to push it along. Our team prepared the final report and we had to find $100 million to make it happen, which was a tough one.
When the Argonauts won the Grey Cup and some young people ran up and down Yonge Street, there ended up being a bit of a riot. Bob Rae appointed Stephen Lewis to take a look at that situation and the overall state of our youth. Lewis penned a letter to Bob, we used to call it the “Dear Bob” letter, and it said that we needed more educational opportunities for youth, and that’s something that Bob needed to look at. As soon as I read that letter, I immediately took the letter and rushed the Seneca Study Report over to Bob’s office and said, “Have I got an educational opportunity for you.” A few short months later, the Minister, Premier, and everyone else involved were up at York making the official announcement to consolidate a Seneca College campus at York University.
Another issue that I faced as an MPP was the De Havilland situation. As we trade, the GST, the dollar and all the elements that impacted just about every sector of the economy also impacted the aerospace industry. Boeing was about to pull out of De Havilland in Downsview Park and the two companies that basically were vying for the plant where outfits from Europe. Alenia Aeronautica and Aerospatiale were both looking to come in and take over the Boeing plant and turn it into an auto parts assembly operation.
At that time, there were somewhere between 5,000 to 7,500 people working at Boeing in Downsview. They were a significant employer with a major economic footprint in the district. Jerry Dias, the President of Unifor, was the president of the local CAW 112. We went into Bob Rae’s office with Jerry Dias and had a little chat with him about there being an opportunity for government and the private sector to work together to save the plant.
In those conversations, we began to get a bit of a toehold. Initially, everybody was a bit lukewarm but the government sort of switched gears in late 1992 and was looking for investment opportunities. We had done a paper deal in northern Ontario and we had done some deals out in Windsor and then all of a sudden, a joint venture between De Havilland and Bombardier looked doable. The government started conversations with Bombardier, and we brought in that outfit. We got to save a lot of jobs at a time when the world was kind of turning on its head. While I got to work on a few projects and make a difference, it was a very difficult time. Every time I went back to my constituency office, particularly on Fridays when the legislature didn’t sit and I scheduled a constituency day, there would be line-ups of people outside of my office looking for work. They would come in and say, “Can you get me a job?” It was a very painful time to be in government.
What were some of the issues in the community when you were elected as a City Councillor and how did you respond to some of the issues that you felt were important.
In 2006, when I was elected to represent Ward 8, York West, there was a real schism between the homeowners and everybody else in the ward. It was a lack of political leadership that bred division between neighbourhoods and spun issues in a way that divided people to organize for political purposes. That was really difficult for me to navigate.
My staff and I spent a long time, several years in fact, building bridges between neighbourhoods. It didn’t matter where you lived, whether you were a homeowner or if you were living in an apartment building. Everybody was a resident, and everybody was facing the same issues. Everybody had to fight to put bread on the table at the end of the day and raise a family while meeting all of the challenges that the day would bring. We worked really hard to create the kind of sentiment on the ground that brought people together as a community. We organized a lot in apartment buildings and worked on Toronto Community Housing projects to get people to reclaim their space, reclaim their streets, and bring them out to public activities. We started community gardens and encouraged meaningful interaction between folks.
There were a lot of hot topics, for example, like the subway extension to York University. Mayor David Miller and other folks here at City Hall were looking to redirect the funds that the provincial government had made available to extend the subway. We built that extension and it works especially well for York University students and the surrounding community. While I agree that 10 years ago, when reviewing the numbers on paper, many would question the purpose of the extension, we know that ridership will increase over time. That was a signature transit project for us, there’s no question about it. I fought to get the chairmanship of the Spadina Subway Committee at the TTC to make sure that if there was anybody that was going to hinder the project that I would be the first to hear about it.
Over the years, you have sat on many committees. Tell me about one or two where you were able to make the biggest contribution.
When I first got here in 2006, I went into Mayor David Miller’s office and said, “Look, I want to introduce a program called landlord licencing here at the city”. This was another big topic for me. He said, “Tell me a little more about that idea…I have never heard of that before.” I told him that there were some places, like Los Angeles, where the local government had a system in place to hold landlords accountable for rental housing conditions. Miller said that if I really wanted to work on that, I should get on the licensing committee. I said, “That’s precisely why I’m here, I’d like to be on the licensing committee, and I’d like to kick-start that program. I’d like to introduce that to the city and see where it goes”.
In my Ward, we had unacceptable housing conditions and we needed to find a way to do something about it. After getting on the licensing committee I think my first press conference here at City Hall was about landlord licensing. I built a coalition with an organization called ACORN and introduced them into the neighbourhood. I brought them up into our part of the world and with ACORN, we rolled up our sleeves and we started to work on organizing tenants. Councillor Howard Moscoe chaired the licensing committee at the time, and we created a program called MRAP – the Multi Residential Audit Program. Nothing like this had existed before. This program involved a special unit of inspectors who had the authority to audit rental buildings. Prior to that, if you lived in an apartment and you felt your building wasn’t clean or being maintained or had adequate heat, you would call an inspector. An inspector would visit your unit and deal with your particular complaint. In our area, most tenants wouldn’t call an inspector for fear of reprisals from the landlord. Instead they would complain to the local politician but would be very reluctant to pick up a phone themselves and actually request an inspector.
What the MRAP program allowed us to do was to have a team of staff audit buildings and common areas. While we didn’t get a lot of buy-in from the tenants who would let the inspectors into their own units to see their apartment, the inspectors themselves started to go out on a mandate and over a span of a couple of years they audited every single rental building in the city. These inspectors wrote thousands of work orders. I started this program in 2007 and it eventually became the municipal audit program.
I gave up the chairmanship of the tenant committee about two or three years ago and the new chair renamed the program to what it is currently known as, RentSafe TO. Initially, I always got resistance from the bureaucrats telling me why we couldn’t do it. “No Councillor, we don’t have the legislative authority. We can’t do landlord licencing; we don’t have the ability to bring in a licencing regime. We can’t have the same law as Los Angeles, we don’t have that authority.” As it turned out, because of the rental audit program that I had essentially started, the City was in a position where they had issued all of these orders that landlords were not acting on. We had all these orders up on the City’s website – thousands of orders – and then we had a limited ability to get that landlord to act on it, other than through the City’s prosecution route. The bureaucrats themselves came back and said to me, “Councillor, I think we can do landlord licencing, I think we can do a licencing system where we can get landlords to be licenced and as a condition of their licence if they don’t adhere to the work order we can remove and have them face the repercussions”. That additional process took a long time to achieve but it was well worth the fight. I am proud to have helped accomplish that.
Every place where I have spent time and projects that I have worked on, there are elements that I’m proud of. Now I’m on the Infrastructure and the Environment Committee and there are two goals that I want to go after. One is a better road maintenance system, because our roads are broken and continuing to crumble. We spend an awful lot of money on very bad asphalt that is mixed in with recycled oils, this means that it’s brittle and that it breaks down. The goal is we spend an enormous amount of money on snow removal, all on outsourcing contracts, and we do a very poor job of clearing snow overall. By my calculation, if we have 40 snow removal incidents a year lasting 24 hours for the 1500 people who we contract to do that work for the four months, it breaks out to somewhere around $87,000 an hour. Not only is that number unacceptable, its unacceptable in that we do a very poor job in the first place.
The other day I saw the televised press conference that showcased staff raving about how they got the snow-clearing job done from the snowstorm that we recently got. The truth is, they didn’t get the job done fully because there were streets a day after the storm that had not been cleared. We had a record number of vehicle accidents, granted it’s the first snow storm of the year, so a lot of people were not prepared for it, but more importantly, we got saved by the weather because if the snow had actually continued we’d be in trouble. We’re in the weather period known as “shouldering” the winter season. Meaning from the first of November to the end, all staff are mandated to do is salt the roads because that is all we have the capacity to do. The snow removal contracts actually start on December 1st. Today, its November 13th and the recent snow event happened on the 11th so we technically had no machines ready because our machines are all contracted to start in December. When we experience snow prior to December 1st, staff get on the phones frantically calling contractors saying, “Please – can you get your machines to our work yards? We’re going to get snow and we need machines to remove it.”
The way our system works now and with climate change, it can’t work that way. We need to re-visit the contracts; we evaluate how we’re set up for snow events. We need to bring back some of our City employees and have more of our own equipment so that when these things happen unexpectedly, the city is able to function. I remember the last quote they said on today’s press conference, “We expect that the weather, between now and the end of the year is going to be milder so we’re not expecting any severe winter events,” and I just thought to myself, you better keep your fingers crossed! Hopefully once our contracted snow removal equipment is in our works yards, then we’ll be in a better position to deal with any upcoming snow events this winter.
Often in the community, we hear residents talking about the things most important to them and that are concerning to them – affordable housing, poverty and employment. Given that these are large issues that also involve other levels of government, how do you as a Councillor, respond to these issues?
We spend a lot of time on housing. For example, I talked about the landlord licencing and that’s exclusively geared to the condition or state of housing along with some of the other major investments that we have brought in – trying to fix some of our Toronto community housing projects. We’re in the middle of a rebuild in the Firgrove community for example in order to rebuild the houses for people because the structures were falling apart around them.
As the Poverty Reduction Advocate for the City of Toronto, one of the big files that I’ve been working on is Fair Pass Discount Program with the TTC, which impacts those on Ontario Works or ODSP recipients. As of this year we’ve extended it to a number of those receiving a childcare subsidy. The next phase of the program will be directed at anyone who meets the low-income threshold that is defined by the federal government. That phase should stream in by 2021. My report as the Poverty Reduction Advocate for the City of Toronto will be going to the Executive Committee tomorrow.
In 2015, Mayor Tory created a department that focuses on poverty issues. The City’s first Poverty Reduction Advocate was Councillor Pam McConnell. Once Pam passed, Councillor Joe Mihevc became the Poverty Reduction Advocate. Beginning this term of council, just over a year ago now, Mayor Tory tapped me for the position. Mayor Tory created this advocacy position here at the City. I think we’re all grateful for that in the sense that poverty then becomes a definable issue with a delegated advocate, which means that there is someone who you can go to and ask, “What are you [the City] doing about it?” I am hoping to help grow that department and broaden the scope of their activities because poverty, as a social issue, transcends every department and level of government.
I’m the third Poverty Reduction Advocate that the City has had, succeeding Pam McConnell and Joe Mihevc in the role. Some time ago the City adopted a twenty-year strategy around poverty reduction measures and this strategy is updated in four-year cycles. The first phase was Pam McConnell’s phase. I could be mistaken but the first Poverty Reduction Strategy Action Report had many initiatives built into the strategy, everything from nutrition programs to TTC discount passes to expanding childcare throughout Toronto.
The Poverty Reduction Office was going to introduce the second phase for the next four-year cycle of the strategy earlier this summer, but it got derailed and delayed when the Ford government announced its 253 hundred million dollar cuts to the city, which would impact everything from Public Health to childcare. This meant that the report was held because we didn’t quite know what the financial implications were going to end up being. That relationship seems to be somewhat stabilized now because the Provincial Government is giving us a slightly clearer sense of what they are in for and what they are not in for and what we will be left to do on our own, so that has made the situation a little clearer. The report will officially go to the Executive Committee tomorrow and it has 31 action items in it for the next phase of the four year cycle and again, it encompasses everything from nutrition to extended library hours, to building more youth hubs and adding further discounts for TTC users.
A healthy environment has been important to you. Tell me about some of the things you have done to improve the environment in the community.
When we first took office, one of the things I wanted to do was to make sure we connected with young people. Sometimes you are hopefully hopeless and I look at our generation and while people may mean well with the environment, I look at how people recycle, I look at how people manage themselves, I look at our footprint and its not really shrinking despite all of the best efforts that everyone is trying to make in that regard. We’re producing far more waste we’ve ever produced before. We are reaching out to young people because I see them as the generation that we really need to sort of sensitize around these issues. I think they are the generation that’s going to fix this problem for us.
Over the years I have engaged young people by going into schools with Live Green Toronto and organize community clean ups and tree planting events. These simple events have a tremendous impact locally. We send Live Green staff into the schools to explain the importance of the environment and keeping our community clean. We ask young people how to be environmentally friendly and how to help Mother Nature in that regard. Then we bring the youth outdoors, clean some parks and plant some trees together. It’s surprising to run into these same young people years down the line and they are all grown up and way taller than I am. They remember having planted a tree in the ravine or having helped clean a park and receiving a water bottle or recognition certificate for their efforts. I believe that environmental responsibility starts locally.
Consumption is a big culprit. All of us have to make our best effort to reduce packaging consumption. In terms of fixing parks, I’ve revitalized every single park in my old Ward 8, including Hullmar Park and Fountainhead Park, which were completed this year. We made a plan early on by identifying every green space and set out to redo each and every park and that’s exactly what we have done. We focussed on redoing one or two per year. There are even more plans in store for Fountainhead Park. This year we put in the new playground and cleaned up the whole area, we’re making provisions to add a water park in the future. I would like to revive the skating rink with a bit of a skate trail and build an amphitheatre. Every Canada Day weekend we show a movie in Fountainhead Park and I want to make it a destination park because we’re going to have the LRT line next to it along with a lot of traffic. I want passengers to look over and see that Fountainhead Park is a nice place to come and spend a little time with their friends or kids. When we are finished with Fountainhead Park, it will be quite the park for people to go to.
I believe that Ward 7 covers the neighbourhoods with the least resources and the most challenges. What are the issues or challenges you are facing today as our city councillor and what ideas or strategies do you have in mind to combat those issues?
You touched on it earlier - we got a lot of density in the 60’s and 70’s without the resources that are needed to support that boom and we’ve been playing catch-up ever since. There hasn’t been any real growth since the 70’s so it’s been a challenge to get the resources that we need to adequately serve the community. That’s now changing for a number of reasons. The city is growing all around us and in our part of the world as well. The subway extension and the LRT will contribute to that growth. What we need to do is make sure that we receive the appropriate investments in community infrastructure and more amenities will come. For example, with the LRT on Finch Avenue, as you know, there’s been a big conversation between the community with Metrolinx about the construction of a potential Hub where people can come together and work under one roof to serve the community. With the transit projects in mind, those new centres are the kinds of things that we now have an opportunity to create. Another example would be the Firgrove revitalization effort, where we have an opportunity to introduce community amenities that didn’t exist in the old design. We need to find a way to push for public facilities so that we don’t make the mistakes that were made historically or that we don’t get the development that was foisted on us historically, without those services.