Maria was first elected to the position as the Catholic School Board Trustee in 1982 and was then elected as the City Councillor in 1985 and served until 2018. Maria is passionate about her work and the communities she has served. She is known for her strong advocacy for those most in need – children, youth and seniors. Maria and her husband, Odoardo have two beautiful children and continues in her fight for justice.
Please start by telling me a little bit about yourself.
As an immigrant, I came here when I was two with my mom to join my dad who had been here for a year already. That was very common in the Italian community. We lived on Euclid Avenue, in Little Italy, downtown. For junior high, we came up and lived in the Amesbury community and went to what was then Queensborough Junior high, now Amesbury Middle School and then to high school at Nelson Boylen on Falstaff. My dad died when my brothers and I were quite young, he died of leukemia. We lost our home and went to live in public housing at 30 Falstaff, off Jane just south of the 401. It was a very difficult struggle for my mom. We moved in when the buildings were new and then within a few years, they became very rough - the drug culture, prostitution culture took over and I witnessed that firsthand.
What I really wanted to do more than anything was to get my family out of public housing. It had become dangerous to live there and I did. I got a job while I was working on my master’s at York and teaching two tutorial classes at the same time and I bought a co-op, an equity co-op like a condo and moved my family out. I have to tell you that it was the hardest thing, harder than childbirth to move out of social housing. It was hard because you lose the safety net. Our society isn’t built on protecting you and giving you incentives. It de-incentivises you to move out because, you know, I was very young, and I had to be responsible for mortgage payments – what the hell is that! I still can’t believe that we did it – it was so very hard. And its harder still for people of colour who live there. I ran into a few people who were our friends then and they said it was easier for me because I was white, and I see that. Its easier for me to get a job, its easier for me to get an advanced education. A lot of it is easier for me. But, my two brother and I became part of the active work force and we contribute to the tax system. My mothers 90 now!
What compelled you to run for political office?
Mike Foster was leading his seat to run for Controller. We had a Board of Control at the time and he and Howard Moscoe were going to do that so I, being a Trustee for the area from 1982 – 1985, jumped into his seat as a Councillor and I was elected as Councillor since 1985. I first ran for the position of Trustee because of an issue of what was then called third languages, now called International Languages. It was a way for the immigrant kids to facilitate their speaking to their grandparents because so many in our community can’t communicate with their grandparents because they don’t know Italian. This became true of the Portuguese community as well. My husband was part of the team at Queen’s Park to introduce third languages to be respected and to be taught in our schools – just as respected as English, geography, etc. Unfortunately, this year 2019) it looks like we’re going to lose them, after all these years. It was the third language program that spurred me on and also the divisiveness in terms of socio-economic status in our communities. Those were the things.
My husband, Odoardo Di Santo was working at the time on streaming and how immigrant kids were routinely streamed into the industrial programs or the secretarial schools. Odoardo was an MPP and he was one of the first Italian MPP’s in the province. He was the MPP for Downsview from 1975 to 1985.
What areas or wards have you covered as a politician over the years?
So, in 1982, as a school Trustee, it was the old wards 2 and 5 – all the way from Trethewey to Steeles Avenue. Then, as a Councillor, it was Ward 5 which was Wilson to Steeles and the east west was Keele to Jane or Hwy. 400. Then the wards merged, and Metro Council had two representatives per ward. Peter LiPreti, Anthony Perruzza, Maria Rizzo and I ran and two of us got elected, Peter LiPreti and I. I was the Metro Councillor and that was for both wards 3 and 5 together. The ward was called Black Creek. They changed the boundaries again because every ten years the boundaries change to reflect growing or lagging populations. They brought it down to the 401 Highway. Over time, I covered a fair number of neighbourhoods in the Jane-Finch area and the surrounding areas.
What were the issues when you were elected?
I think safety, especially with the death of Brianna Davey – a three-year-old who died in one of the Jane-Finch neighbourhoods. I formed a panel called the Building Hope Coalition and I had lots of support from different parts of the city. There is a long list of people who were involved who were into community building and people who care about the social safety net. This community was built with an overabundance of housing for low-income people and without any services for them. That makes the difference between this community and a similar community say in downtown Toronto which may have had similar numbers but they have the social safety net to protect the residents (St. Stephens, Dixon Hall, West Neighbourhood House) and that makes a difference between living a life in despair and living a life where you can have a living.
I got into some trouble for saying this, but I’ll say it again. The way housing was planned here and is perpetuated (I said this when I was extremely angry), is a deFacto apartheid because people of colour are automatically shut into communities where there is no hope of getting out. Drug trafficking is exasperated by nooks and crannies that are architecturally built into the townhouse communities. The ideas of towers in the park which was supposed to be a wonderful idea and it works in Don Mills so why doesn’t it work here. It didn’t work here because as I said, no social safety net and not enough programs to provide the backup for failing families and individual needs.
There are not enough incentives for the educational system to have kids succeed, not enough skill apprenticeship to make the skill trades viable options for families. Not enough of anything good. Fear set in when a book was published called Cries from the Corridor by a teacher, Peter McLaren about one of the local schools. I did a three-year stint on the Public School Board representing Catholic electors at the time and that is when the three-tier system came in – special needs schools 1, 2 and 3. Jane-Finch invariably and Maple Leaf school, got a 3 and I remember some old-time trustees saying, “Well, it must be the kids in the apartments.” Well of course it’s the kids in the apartments – they were treated differently. When one of them died, they would ask, “Well, was it one of the kids from a home or from the apartments?” as though an apartment wasn’t a home. They didn’t distinguish the word house from home. I was very young – in my twenties and I felt each and every one of those comments because I had lived in social housing in one of those apartments.
I was pregnant most of my early days being a trustee and then being a councillor. I had two children and really mistreated by the males and by other members of council. I shouldn’t distinguish, I should say females too. I tried to bring one of my babies to a meeting and one of the women who was a trustee and then a councillor, told me to get out. Total discrimination for women who were having babies.
What are the issues now?
You think they are different – no! Nothing has changed. The housing hasn’t been replaced and I remember getting close to getting 1 million dollars once for a road to be built along side a townhouse community, through Yorkwoods up from Oakdale. That was taken away because it didn’t get support. The road would have provided visibility. Sometimes I just wanted to throw up my hands. One of the townhouse communities is at Megellan (Jane-Sheppard) and we worked on a project to get 100% of the adolescent’s summer jobs - 100% employment one summer. I was so happy until someone said to me, “Well all we did was have one of the gangs go to the 14 years old now.” That hit me like a ton of despair, and I started crying and I was in the rotunda at City Hall and I thought, that’s it, we can’t do anything good. We can’t do anything good and at that point I just saw darkness. It was dark until the next project came along – I like working on projects. I like building things.
The old 31 Police Station (Jane-Sheppard) had barb wire around it – it was closed down and there was an old abandoned hydro station beside it. I worked for years and years and after eleven years I got a beautiful award-winning library built with all windows. The first lap-top lending library was there, and it wasn’t my vision of what it could have been as I wanted something with two stories with community rooms. I had no other councillor backing me – I didn’t have the mayor. It took me eleven years and I only got it because we closed down another library (at Jane-Wilson) and saved the money that would have gone into rental. I thought, how pitiful, how pathetic that one of the neediest parts of the City had to rely on closing a library and using the money that we would have paid in rent to build a new one. But four months after it opened, the librarian told me, the head of the library board actually, that the readership among young people went up 76% and I thought, that’s it. If that’s the only thing I do in my life, that’s enough. And then, I got an outdoor amphitheater built beside it by scrapping together more money the year after. I built a beautiful amphitheatre, old Grecian Sicilian style that kids can perform in, using the space from the old hydro-site. The local schools help me name it and the winning name is Reading Sprouts Garden. A local girl who lives in one of the public housing townhouses’ there won and so she got pizza for her whole school.
Also, beside the library is Humewood House, an apartment for teenage mothers. When that was happening, people said that I should have been ashamed of myself. I remember Doorstep Neighbourhood Services saying that but I’m not ashamed of myself because it was the grandmothers who came to me and asked me to fight it. One particular grandmother from the Caribbean, came to me and said, “They were building a home for girls with babies and girls who were pregnant – you can’t let this happen.” And I asked, “Why not?” And she said “Because you don’t know its like in our community. A lot of them get pregnant because they want the government to look after them and they don’t want to work. It’s a disincentive.” So, I talked to some of the other grandmothers and they agreed. ‘you have to stop it because the girls will see that and think, oh my God, the government will take care of us here, I’ll have a welfare cheque to buy the food’ and they made a lot of sense to me. I don’t know their lives. So, I honoured them and their request. I did not do it from “not in my back yard”, rather it did it for them.
I want so much for girls to not to have to do that, but they do that.
What I went through at Jane-Sheppard was one of the most difficult times in my life – I must have cried for two months after that. No body took the time to understand or to even ask me why I took that position. They just assumed that I was prejudiced. I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do. Also, I was really close with my friend from the Caribbean and I respected her opinion.
I did a show called Political Blind Date and it aired on TVO. I chose Firgrove because it was closing and a lot of resistance was set up for them to get new housing so if you got number 100 in the lottery, that meant there were 99 people in front of them to choose their new home. I saw a lot of women in despair because a lot of these townhouses and apartments are rented by female-led families as was mine growing up and I really felt for them, so I got some of them on camera. It made a splash for awhile and then everything goes back – everything goes back to the default setting of not caring. These communities were built to insulate people from the outside society. Ambulances can’t get in; firetrucks can’t get in – how safe it that?
What have you found to be challenging as a politician?
I remember I had one month off when I had a baby and someone made a remark at the first council meeting, at North York. Someone said we should welcome the councillor back – she had a boy. Mel Lastman looked at me and said, “Oh, are you back?” I once went on a parade with him near Trethewey and it was one of those rare times that he came out and he said, “I didn’t know that this was in North York.”
At 15 Tobermory where I had my first tenant meeting, I had to step over a pool of blood in the lobby to get to the meeting. I did it and then later that night when I was in bed I was thinking, “I stepped over a pool of blood.” Why didn’t I think about it – I didn’t think about it. The fact that I hadn’t reacted to it, made me react later. Having lived in social housing, you become de-sensitized in some way, but do you know brought back bad memories, more than anything? Smells - more than sight; the smells of the stairwells, the urine smell and the smell of the cleaner. They would immediately bring tears to my eyes. The poverty that you experience as a child doesn’t leave you.
There was this president of a large foundation – big job. I got together with her over the work that I was doing with sports, bringing sports-related camaraderie to Jane-Finch and other communities as I was a sports advocate for awhile. She told me, with tears in her eyes, that she used to live at Megellan (Jane-Sheppard) and I said, “Oh, okay.” So, I don’t ask so she says, “I never got invited to the birthday parties because they were across the street and nobody came to mine.” Megellan divides social housing from private housing. She is one of the most successful women I have ever known! Then another one, a woman who is really high up in a development company told me that she saw a newspaper article that I wrote about the Santa box from the Toronto Star and she said she had to call me to tell me how I brought tears to her eyes because she used to get them and she had blocked it out.
What have been some of your accomplishments?
I did a lot of work in the Jane-Sheppard area – I built a library and amphitheatre there and that was one of my favourite accomplishments. Building parks – I built so many parks. I have a vision of a mega senior’s campus and just today, I met with a Vice President of real estate for Downsview Park to help guide it along. There is a woodlot at Grandravine and Keele and there’s a horseshoe all around the existing plaza that’s there. I want a senior’s centre there, behind the current seniors nursing home. I want graduated care so you have private residence for those who can afford it and have no money problems, then you have one that is semi-financed by government and other sources - they could be religious or ethno-cultural. Then you have nursing homes. I want to go from 300 to 500 nursing homes because we need them. Seniors have no place to go and they are ground floor related. Then you have graduate to more hospice care and then you have a shelter. I have a commitment from the Catholic School Board that they would build a school on the site up to ten acres. I have a commitment from the City that they will build up to 90 childcare spaces so we’ll have a youth portion so that it won’t be only for seniors and the federal government along with the other two levels will kick in for a 60 million dollar community centre and an aquatic centre that will be the envy of the GTA. I have the sketches for that. The previous Liberal government made an announcement in 2018 and pledging 16 million for this facility that will be on the corner of Keele and Sheppard in the William Baker neighbourhood. The armed forces houses were torn down in William Baker and there’s a beautiful park there. I got a commitment that the park be forever in Canadian hands, so they won’t tear down the trees but to build around it. The density that is there now, they want to build like 14,000 apartment or something. I say, move it to the subway station and now it makes sense. Re-opening the secondary plan and moving it, Bombardier will disappear from Downsview in the next five years, unfortunately, so the flight path won’t be an issue anymore. Height restrictions will be gone, and they will put the high-rise condo’s and apartments near Chesswood and at the Downsview Park subway. So, that’s my vision going forward. And that’s what I want to do. I announced it prior to the last election, and I got nearly 70% of the vote in the area – the support was just overwhelming for this vision.
With regards to Downsview Park, I led the fight that has become a twenty-seven-year fight now to keep at least part of it as Park land. They were going to bull-dozer the whole thing. I’m very proud of bringing community together for that. We spoke as one unified voice. We lost the fight for housing at the OMB but we might win the war.
I was very encouraged by Moth Garden. In Downsview Memorial Park, at the corner of Keele and Wilson, nobody knew there used to be a park there. I was at Downsview United Church one day which has a wonderful history in the community – one of my favourite places actually, and I saw a plaque on the wall with four boys’ names. They told me they were from the community, one from Weston, one from Downsview and they died in the 2nd World War. There was supposed to be memorial to them in the park and I said, “there’s no memorial.” So, I went there with a shovel. It was March and I dug underneath the snow and found the remanence of a fountain. There used to be a beautiful fountain there with flowers, on the north east corner of Keele and Wilson. I found in the microfiche file a note from the Commissioner of Public Works saying that it wasn’t worth fixing the fountain for $4,000 because the community wasn’t sophisticated enough to understand the concept of art and the fountain. He was afraid that they would wash in it or bath in it. I was so incensed and the Commissioner at the time, when I found this information, was Joe Halstad and he was great. He helped me find the money and we turned it into an art competition. The woman who won was the daughter of one of the first women to fly the Moth Aircraft from the Dehaviland Plant in Downsview. She designed it so that it would spell MOTH from the air. The M is a rose garden, the O is where we have the Downsview
November 11th memorials every year and the T and H are checkers and chess boards. Its lovely. It looks like landing strip with blue lights at night. Royson James did a couple features for the Toronto Star about it, all the perennials, the windsocks – just evoking the history of aircraft in the Downsview area. I’m very proud of that one.
I built another park in memory of Bob Leek who died of a massive heart attack when the propane blast went off in Downsview (near Keele and Wilson) in 2008. It’s a beautiful park near Hanover Street adjacent to Bombardier so the workers use it everyday. It has a little kids gym called “Save Me”. It’s a house and there’s a fire-fighter kid climbing over the railings and saving people. I tried to give each park a theme.
One of the things I like the most was putting in splash pads in the neediest communities. I did this because people don’t have pools, they don’t have any water cooling in July and August. My first was behind the buildings at Exbury Towers. I did one at Spenvalley Park at Jane-Sheppard because those kids have nothing. So, a splash pad is exciting for them and it keeps the little kids cool on hot, hot days. They may not have air conditioning in their homes, so I try to make life better for little kids. I try to make life better for adolescents by putting in youth lounges in the libraries. Downsview Library has always been a favourite of mine. I’ve got them lots of money over the years over Section 37 planning money for computers and youth lounges. One of the things I’m excited about is a corner that I built in Downsview Library for pre-school children. I wanted them to get used to a library before they learned how to read when its fun and when its tactile. There’s a little airplane there in the library. There’s a lot of computers in the libraries because of the section 37 planning funds. We won’t have that anymore under Bill 108.
One other thing – I brought in an afterschool program into the Roding Community Centre so that 80 kids have a place to go after school who didn’t before. Its one of a kind in the city. No other school or community centre has it and it was supposed to be the model for others but then funding was cut. I wanted kids to have an edge of some kind, so I tried to make girls programs at community centres. I brought in more girls’ programs because studies have found, in big cities in the Midwest, there were fewer unwanted pregnancies when you have girls leadership programs. They instill self-worth and responsibility. I thought they were important, so I got the principals to band together to have them included in their after-school programs and the cities programs at Grandravine and Northwoods. And it was done.
This part of the city is very diverse (homeowners, social housing, renters, different ethno-cultural groups, etc.). How have you managed that?
I find that people want the same kind of things for their kids. They want chances, opportunities in an educational milieu where people can succeed if they work hard. No one doesn’t want that. I focus on what brings people together. I had challenges when communities were split – very much so. I was lobbying one year for $500,000 for the Black Creek Community Farm. And, I saved it. It was on the chopping block at the City. Its there and its hiring Jane-Finch and Rexdale kids because of my intervention and I was so proud of that. I saved it from the chopping block at Budget Committee. I felt a very close relationship there because I’ve always felt that Black Creek Pioneer Village, behind the farm, was one of the most important treasures in our community. I was chair of the Toronto Regional Conservation Authority (TRC) which runs Pioneer Village for a long time. I was on the board of the Conservation Authority for thirty years, so I always had a special relationship with Pioneer Village, and I did fund-raising for them. I tried to get local kids from the local community in for free as much as possible. Next Friday, we are announcing the ground-breaking of a new building on Shoreham. I’m bringing back the Toronto Regional Authority building and its administrative office. Its going to be beautiful – all wood, inside and out…another treasure. The building that used to be there wasn’t big enough for us and wasn’t fixable. So, we rented and now we’re going to come back. Its going to be an iconic building – all heavy lumber. I am so proud of that. All my political life, I have been appointed to sit on the Toronto Regional Conservation Board. I became the vice chair, then the chair and now past chair.
The TRC is made up of people from Toronto and the region. Toronto has half of the members and Durham; Peel and York have half the members. So, its all the regions in the GTA together. It’s a Board of Directors with politicians and citizens from all over. There are over 30 members on the Board. The TRC is very important to protect the lands because unscrupulous developers have their eye on ravine land, especially in the 905 area. I remain on the Board until December and then will retire from that as I did it for three decades.
What needs to change in this community?
I think we need to have representatives, both citizen and political representatives who are not as careful, not as sensitive, not as worried about telling the truth. We must publicly recognize racism and how its institutionalized and call it what it is - the poverty, the economic disparity and things are getting worse, not better. People say that after I did the TVO show, it showed that I have not enough hope for the future – well I don’t with this lot. It’s the same old, same old. We need people that aren’t afraid to speak. I don’t think any Mayor would have me on his or her executive team because I don’t make that deal that you need to make – that handshake. It will never come from me.
Any other comments?
Did you know that Jane-Finch does the greatest advocacy that I have ever seen? By the way, York South, the Mount Dennis community is like Jane-Finch – very similar and the kind of people who I see speaking up, I’m very proud of. I could align myself with community residents and stakeholders who speak the truth and who aren’t afraid of consequences. I like that, I admire that, I respect that.