This is my first post for the Toronto Star's Your City My City blog. It is reposted from here: http://thestar.blogs.com/yourcitymycity/2010/04/changing-torontos-political-culture.html Toronto, the city and the region, is being transformed. Like many global urban regions, we are growing rapidly and that growth is changing the face of our community. A recent StatsCan study tells us that by 2031 we can expect the people of the Toronto region to be 63% visible minorities. We are experiencing rapid and accelerating change on many fronts, but our political culture isn't keeping pace. If it doesn't catch up, we risk creating a city plagued by systemic problems stemming from exclusion, political dysfunction and the growth of a permanent underclass alongside a confused dominant class trying to reclaim an idea of Toronto based upon a mirage from its past. Others have argued, and I agree, that the people who govern our city ought to reflect the diversity of the city itself. All adult permanent residents of Toronto should have the the opportunity to vote municipally and fully participate in civic life, regardless of their Canadian citizenship status. Despite the many commenters to the post by Gelek Badheytsang linked above who find the idea offensive, it is an idea whose time is coming. Newcomers and their children need better on-ramps to civic participation. Beyond specific political reforms, I argue that we also need a cultural shift. Torontonians are a reserved people. Visitors often comment on our city's coolly aloof attitude, while at the same time lauding our diversity and the vibrancy of our multicultural assets. How do we reconcile these two impressions? My hunch is that the dominant culture's tolerance of diversity has for the most part been made easy by social distance and relative prosperity. When difficult decisions press us - hard choices forced upon us by limited resources - how well will we perform at reconciling our differences? It's not just our leaders who need to change. We need to change. "We have to engage", John Tory said on this blog post, "WE have to listen to EACH OTHER". I agree. I believe that we change the realm of possibilities when we shift the dialogue we have about this city and our place within it. We need to talk about our responsibilities to each other as well as our rights and individual needs and desires. We need a movement for civic engagement powered by people. We need to have difficult conversations that acknowledge our differences and we need to transcend these differences in ways that help us make collective decisions. We need to recognize that our futures are shared, and we need to seize the opportunity to participate in shaping that shared future. My vision of the future of Toronto as a livable city is a place where citizenship, civic life and community are re-imagined and reinvigorated, where the potential of our diversity is realized as a strength and an asset for our future prosperity. For the experiment of Toronto to succeed, we as a people must become world leaders in civic engagement and civic innovation that embraces an inclusive diversity. This will be difficult. This is a job for all of us; not only our City government, our elected officials and our civic leaders. In future posts, I will propose specific ideas for how to realize this vision. I invite you to share your own ideas in the comments. About Mark Kuznicki

Well Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin don't get the last laugh. It turns out that the community organizer could kick the 9/11 hero's ass and take down a helicopter-armed rogue moose-hunter for good measure. When Rudy and Palin scoffed at Obama's background as a community organizer, I instinctively bristled. Tuesday night showed what community organizing can do. Not only did Obama take the electoral college in a landslide, but the 50-state strategy made red states like North Carolina blue while turning many others purple. He did it with huge turnout, a dominant position among emerging voter blocks like youth and ethnic voters and with techniques learned from the trenches in Chicago. Only a community organizer could pull this off. The stories from the field about the Obama vs McCain ground game show the difference. Obama's field offices were reported full and buzzing with volunteers from all over the country. McCain's campaign offices were mostly empty and dull, or closed. Then there's the Obama campaign's web strategy, which will go down in history as the first mass scale and most effective use of the social web for political or any other form of organization. But it's just the beginning, and there is so much yet to be written! Change.gov shows that Obama fully intends to take his massive email and sms lists, the lessons learned from the campaign and his community organizing instincts together with a new call and program around National Service to really transform the meaning of politics, community and country. The clues are there, and I just can't help but stare in awe and amazement. For those of us who dreamed of the potential of marrying bottom-up social movements with a new kind of leadership style, it's hard to process that our moment may really truly be now. All of a sudden, the work of community organizing just got a new and rather Presidential luster. For those of us who work in the field where social web and real-world issues meet, it's going to be a very busy time indeed.

Via Andrew Sullivan: The next generation - Generation Y, the Millennials, the Net Generation - emerges, announces itself and declares its intentions this year. I talk about these amazing, creative and post-partisan young people a lot in my work - their values, the way they work, their use of media, their learning styles. I usually explain that my role, and the role of my Generation X peers, is to act as translators and brokers between the Boomers and their Millennial children - transferring knowledge, power and capital to a new generation that will become the dominant force in our future. I know my place, and I have confidence in their abilities to fix the crap their parents have left in their wake.

A broad progressive (neo-progressive?) movement is emerging on the web, rallying Canadian netizens to defeat the Harper Conservatives in the October 14th federal election.  Dozens of sites and groups have suddenly emerged in the blogosphere and on Facebook with a single unified goal - to defeat the Harper government. I'm helping with one of these campaigns, AnyoneButHarper.ca, which is a viral media and strategic voting campaign launched from a Facebook group in less than two weeks.  The idea is to create, distribute and share viral media that will drive anti-Harper forces to take action in the form of strategic voting.  The campaign includes videos produced by community members that are hosted on Vimeo and YouTube and a strategic voting widget hosted at Widgetbox. The strategic voting widget is a democracy hack response to the current situation that progressive Canadians face. Today, the Conservative party can achieve a majority government and push ahead a neo-conservative agenda with only 38% of the popular vote. This is due to the first-past-the-post electoral system and a splintered centre-left  composed of four parties lined up against a united right wing Conservative party. Other approaches to hack this situation include sites and groups that facilitate strategic vote swapping between progressives living in different ridings supporting different centre-left parties. Meanwhile our friends at Fair Vote Canada are creating a home for Ophan Voters - voters whose votes do not help elect anyone in a first-past-the-post system. They hope to raise awareness of the need for electoral reform, but they are challenged in building the momentum they need when the beneficiaries of the current system control the path to reform. It appears that fundamental reform is not gaining sufficient traction, certainly not in the short term. Why now?  I think this activity can be seen as the result of some underlying forces:

1. The social web and the technologies of so-called Web 2.0
2. The experience of MoveOn.org and the Obama campaign in the U.S. election
3. A frustrated and digitally enabled electorate, looking for change but lacking a galvanizing leader (like an Obama) to rally behind

Can regular Canadians, using the tools of the web, work around the limitations of first-past-the-post electoral system to snatch a progressive outcome from a system otherwise gamed in the favour of the incumbent Conservative party? This emerging movement is going to try. It remains to be seen what it can do in the short three weeks remaining in this electoral cycle.

I highly recommend reading my good friend David Eaves' article Progressivism's End co-written with his frequent collaborator, Taylor Owen. The analysis is very strong and it is the most effectively written articulation of what I believe to be the emerging realignment of policy and politics as influenced by web technology, the creative class and the steady transition of power from Boomers to Gen Y. Because I love it so, a couple of excerpts. On how the Left is killing Progressivism:

Seeing their hard-fought accomplishments under threat, traditional baby boomer progressives began to prioritize the survival of New Deal policies and institutions over the idealistic outcomes they were built to promote. Thus the central paradox of progressivism was born: its older-style advocates, entrenched against innovation and reform, even in the service of progressive values, had unwittingly become the new conservatives.

And on Obama's internet fundraising and engagement strategy:

...[it} creates a network of people directly and meaningfully invested in his campaign. The millions of visitors to mybarackobama.com are encouraged to use, remix and contribute to the Obama message, which in turn facilitates its breadth and scope. They are given some control and made to feel ownership over the very identity of the campaign. During the primaries alone, 30,000 completely independent Obama events were organized through the website. This is not command-and-control politics. It represents a decentralization of governance that is a harbinger of things to come: Obama’s online network was leveraged to assist victims of last spring’s midwestern floods.

Eaves and Taylor go beyond a simple reading of Obama's influence to the underlying forces that created such fertile ground for Obama's emergence. From technology change, to social movements to demographics - there is a compelling case that we are the cusp of a epochal change and realignment of politics, with Obama himself an early signal of the future and a midwife to this change. But what of Canada?

It is unclear whether any Canadian party is currently able to have this discussion. The political landscape is limited. The Progessive Conservatives are gone, and the NDP, because of its statist model, and Liberals, because of their years in power, remain caught in the progressive paradox — more often than not defending old institutions and approaches.

Readers will know that I am one of those swept up in the neo-progressive hope that Obama represents. I am also one of the many Canadians looking at our own politics with profound disappointment at the state of political leadership and politics in our country. As we enter our own election, we see a fractured "progressive" slate of four parties splitting votes and lacking coherence. We need political leadership with roots in social movements, as Eaves and Taylor suggest. In the search for such a leader, we should all have a look at Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada. Check out the full interview of her on Question Period, where she describes a post-ideological position that reflects her roots in the environmental movement as well as the Progressive Conservative party. With the entry of a Green Party MP into the House of Commons, and with a movement and a lawsuit to get May's participation on the slate of future leadership debates, we may finally hear an articulation of a post-ideological neo-progressive agenda that embraces Canadian values of environmental stewardship, without the statist baggage of the NDP, the historical privilege of the Liberals or the separatist non-starter that is the Bloc Quebecois.

Yesterday in Toronto, I co-hosted and facilitated an open forum on the future of Canada's open internet with Matt Thompson of http://savetheinternet.com and Steve Anderson of http://saveournet.ca/. The intent of the gathering was to engage Toronto's tech/web/media community around the issue of network neutrality and to launch a coalition and campaign to preserve and enhance Canada's digital future. In March, the net neutrality issue finally made the front pages and broadcast media in Canada, triggered by news of Bell Canada's throttling of third-party Internet Service Providers' peer-to-peer traffic. The unilateral action was seen by advocates of a neutral and open Internet as anti-competitive and a dangerous precedent, and it triggered a backlash against Bell Canada. Bell confirmed advocates worst fears in May, when it launched its own online video store after having throttled P2P traffic, much of which is dedicated to video - both legal and otherwise. Thompson provided some excellent background on the issue drawing from his experience on the U.S. campaign around network neutrality, which is well advanced compared to the debate in Canada. Matt shared the U.S. focused viral video, Save the Internet!, which won a 2007 Webby People's Voice Award: Thompson presented a clear description of the principles underlying the neutral and open web and its importance to Canada's future as an innovative economy and a free society. He also articulated a nuanced understanding that the last-mile monopoly providers (principally Bell and Rogers in Canada) aren't evil, they are merely doing their job and lobbying for rules that are in their shareholders' interests. He described that what is really missing in Canada is everybody else - all the many stakeholders that are damaged by a set of norms that currently allows for discrimination of content on the web by these monopoly providers. Canada needs a plan. Thompson made a passionate plea that the real underlying issue is that the government of Canada's laissez faire approach ("we don't regulate the Internet") shows that Canada has no plan for its digital future. It has no vision about the infrastructure for everything else, and how we're going to compete in a global digital future when other countries have long passed us by in terms of broadband policy, infrastructure speed, access and costs. Compare this situation against Barack Obama's Technology policies. and it's clear that there is a political opportunity to show leadership on the technology file. SaveOurNet.ca promises to be a vehicle for everybody else. SaveOurNet.ca is intended to act as a broad, inclusive coalition of strange bedfellows: freedom of speech activists and technology entrepreneurs; unions and third-party ISPs; large technology companies and broadcasters. SaveOurNet.ca needs our community's help. Effective awareness campaigns like the Save the Internet video, coalition building, media relations, community engagement, participation in CRTC hearings and direct lobbying of elected officials requires dedicated resources - volunteers alone won't do it. Big players are being lined up to support the effort, including major public sector unions and companies like Google Canada and Teksavvy. But the campaign needs a vote of confidence from Canada's web/tech/media and other communities of interest to trigger the pooling of additional resources from larger organizations and foundations. In fundraising terms, SaveOurNet.ca is looking for Angels.

What You Can Do:

1. Sign onto the coalition at http://SaveOurNet.ca/, either as an individual supporter or as an organizational supporter.
2. PLEASE DONATE what you can to the seed fund for SaveOurNet.ca, and then blog about it, share it on Facebook, send to your networks and communities, talk about it.
3. Contact your MP's office and arrange for a sit-down chat about the issue during their summer hiatus from Parliament. Just booking the appointment will force your MP to get briefed on the issue, which is the first step in educating our elected officials and raising it on the political agenda come the fall.