Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I'm hoping I can do this by asking that the old map of Toronto Centre be put up. Then I can talk about what's happened.
What I'm concerned about is actually quite simple.
That is the new riding boundary here on the left. I'm wondering if the old one can be put up on the right-hand screen.
If you look at the right-hand screen, you'll see it's a big riding, essentially stretching from the university to the Don Valley Parkway, all the way from the water up to Rosedale and Moore Park. It contains the richest and the poorest parts of the city of Toronto, indeed almost of Canada. It's kind of a unique riding in that sense.
Because of the huge population growth in the south, because of the condo developments in the south, the commission has had to wrestle with the fact that the riding is now very big population-wise, and therefore has had to be cut.
In the first draft of the suggestion, basically the riding was cut in half. The concern at that point was that the gay community in the area of Church and Yonge, and north of Church and Wellesley Street, and north of Wellesley, was being cut in half. We had very active representation from a number of community associations who objected to that.
We managed to persuade the commission to change the northern boundary of the new riding so that it would go further north than Wellesley Street to Charles, and essentially would allow us to make sure that we had a cohesive community, but in so doing, unfortunately as often happens, the commission then said, “Well, we have to cut it off somewhere, so we're going to cut it off at the south end on Front Street.”
The effect of that, for those of you who know Toronto at all, is to say that the area known as the St. Lawrence Market area, which has very active riding associations north and south of Front Street.... You will be familiar with the David Crombie development that's associated with his time as mayor, where a number of co-ops, apartments, and condos were built south of Front Street, which is integrally connected to the area north of Front Street.
What I have proposed to you, and what I've had some discussions about with one of my neighbours, Olivia Chow, is that the boundary should in fact be the Gardiner Expressway and not Front Street on the south, in exchange for which we would give up all of the area west of Yonge Street.
If you see the boundary on the left-hand side, the western boundary, it jogs from Bay to Yonge and then over to Bay again. I'm arguing that if you just went to Yonge Street south of College right down to Front Street, you would probably deal more or less with the demographic issue with respect to whether the population is in or out of line.
That is the proposal I would make. It's not just being made by me; there have been many representations from people who live in the south and who feel that their community of interest has been cut in half. It's not a demographic big deal.
By the way, for some of you who might be of a suspicious nature, politically it's a mixed bag. There's no telling which way it would go in terms of what would happen in the next election.
I've made a point of not referring to it as my riding, because I have not decided whether or not I'll run in 2015, and if I do, I haven't decided which riding I would run in, because effectively my old riding has been divided in half. So if I may try to be modest for a moment, this is not about me. It really is about the representations I've heard from the people in the south end of the riding.
On the suggestion that the apartments that run essentially from Front Street up to College Street to the west of Yonge Street—that is to say, in the Bay corridor—can go anywhere, I think in terms of a community of interest, there are people who are moving in and out of that area all the time. From a downtown urban point of view, it's not really a big deal as to which riding they're in. It is a bigger deal for the more settled communities around the St. Lawrence Market, where there are very identifiable communities of interest that have always been there.
I want to express my appreciation to the commission for the changes they agreed to make in the northern half of the new Toronto Centre, the middle part of the old riding, because they did in fact recognize the community of interest, particularly within the gay and lesbian community in that part of the city. However, in so doing, they may have made a mistake of which they were not entirely aware, which I can fully understand, but I've been receiving very forceful representations from people in the market saying that they want to be part of the same riding and they'd like that riding to be the riding of Toronto Centre.
Quite apart from the rest of what Olivia is suggesting, I think that has implications for other ridings, which I can't get into. However, from the point of view of trying to have a relatively coherent and cohesive riding of Toronto Centre that would not significantly disrupt the demographics of other ridings, that would be an adjustment that I would respectfully request, even though it means that Toronto Centre becomes landlocked once again and is cut off from all access to the lake, which is a historic tragedy and may require more aggressive action later on.