When community organizer Dave Meslin walks into city hall he sees room for improvement. There’s a waterfall of brochures for things to do in the city — go to the ROM!, eat with very poor manners at Medieval Times! — yet nothing about the political process or how to get involved. There are offices that form the outer ring of the first floor atrium, but city hall lacks a civic engagement office on any floor, let alone at the entrance to the building.
Meslin, who works as a community consultant in addition to being a member of The Hidden Cameras, thinks Toronto can do better. To further this conversation, he put together The Fourth Wall, a display with 36 recommendations for how Toronto can foster better civic participation.
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Based on his September 2010 TEDxToronto talk “Antidote to Apathy,” Meslin’s expanded recommendations include upgrades like holding more city hall meetings during non-business hours, re-designing public notices to make them more legible and overhauling the municipal electoral system to a ranked ballot format.
Originally on display at 401 Richmond, Meslin’s Fourth Wall exhibit will finally tour Toronto’s City Hall after making appearances of various kinds in London, Ontario, Pemberton, British Columbia and Calgary, Alberta. To him, it’s exactly where the conversation needs to take place, “Symbolically it’s the most appropriate place for the exhibit to be. A lot of the exhibit deals specifically with the physical space of the lobby and rotunda, and also council meetings.”
Meslin acknowledges that systemic changes happen slowly in a bureaucracy as large as Toronto’s. While Pemberton changed their public notices after one civil servant saw Meslin’s project, the same process would talk two to three years in Ontario’s capital and involve input from solicitors, developers and planners.
Despite this, incremental progress is being made. Councillor Paul Ainslie (Ward 43, Scarborough East) adopted 15 motions from the Fourth Wall exhibit at the government management committee, and they are currently in various stages of study by city staff.
Additionally, since the start of the year city hall has offered free wifi in council and committee chambers, an accessibility boon to citizens and journalists alike.
Meslin frames government as an institution that should work to connect citizens to its available process rather than viewing engagement as a hindrance to getting things done. This message has earned bi-partisan support at the rancorous clamshell: Ford ally Ainslie has championed the ideas, moderate Mary-Margaret McMahon (Ward 32, Beaches-East York) arranged the city hall space for the presentation and Doug Ford (Ward 2, Etobicoke North) and Mike Layton (Ward 19, Trinity-Spadina) have offered high praise for his work despite divergent political views.
Meslin argues that the nature of the project transcends typical left and right politics: “Really, what I’m talking about is liberating the free market of political ideas,” he says with a decidedly Fordian twist. “[Rob Ford] often talks about how the voters are supreme. He positions himself as a servant of the people, and this exhibit is about how we can better connect with those people, how these people who are allegedly supreme can have a voice.”
Meslin is heartened by the fact that places like Pemberton have embraced his suggestions, which he collected over the years from research in Toronto to visiting city halls in Europe while on tour with the band.
The fact that a small city in British Columbia could take up his ideas so quickly makes him optimistic that Toronto can do the same. “The subheading for the recommendations is ‘a recipe for change’ and the implications are twofold. First of all, change is possible, and secondly, here’s a roadmap for it.”
To achieve that, Meslin is going to continue to focus on systemic issues while policymakers prioritize issue-by-issue concerns.
“I don’t think we can address any political issue adequately at city hall if the democratic process isn’t functioning properly. Everything else flows from process.”
The Fourth Wall runs at City Hall until Sunday evening in the atrium. Admission is free and Meslin will be waiting at a table to give you a tour.