TheBulletin.ca Journal of Downtown Toronto
By Duncan McAllister –
Community planner and Church-Wellesley Village resident Chris Drew maintains that if it weren’t for one email and a special phone call, “I could have ended up spending the rest of my summers in university working in a warehouse in Etobicoke.”
Long before there was Facebook and Twitter, there was the “Listserv for Young Liberals.”
In September of 2002, while studying urban planning at Ryerson, “I wrote basically an opinion piece that I sent out to about 200 Young Liberals on there, talking about the new deal for cities and how I was very excited as a young planning student that Paul Martin was well on his way to becoming Prime Minister at that point.” says the now 28-year-old Drew.
“From that email that went out, some volunteers in the Paul Martin campaign contacted me and asked if I wanted to volunteer for them.” That summer he was offered a job in Bill Graham’s constituency office and ended up staying on, doing casework and outreach for three years. As a result, it took him 7 years to graduate from his 4-year program at Ryerson.
Drew was hired as a community planner shortly after MPP Glen Murray won the February 2010 by-election for Toronto-Centre.
The Community Plan is currently the major priority for Glen Murray and his staff—in fact, it’s not often that MPP’s have a planner on staff; that’s typically done more by the municipality.
In an effort to be more proactive, Drew says that Murray’s approach “is to try and front-end the decision-making and the consultation so that rather than communities finding out about announcements or projects or funds that become available after it’s either been announced or is essentially complete, we’re trying to get a sense of what are the challenges of Toronto Centre going to be over the next 10, 20, 30 years, and what are some of the initiatives that we need to bring forward working with the community to address those challenges.”
“Toronto Centre is one of the most fascinating pieces of geography, probably in Canada. It’s not enough to say Toronto Centre is diverse—that almost makes it sound too simplistic—it’s diverse in its diversity.”
Drew is an avid cyclist, his bicycle parked in the office to keep out of the rain that day. He has already signed up for the Toronto BIXI bike sharing project. “If you look at the map of where it’s happening, basically it’s a good two thirds of Toronto Centre in terms of its land mass, in terms of coverage and where its stations are going to be.”
While at Ryerson, Drew was instrumental in lobbying the administration to create an on-campus bicycle storage and repair facility. His idea was for Ryerson to partner with the City on bikes. “Now with the BIXI program, if there’s a location close enough to Union Station and Ryerson, then you pay your BIXI membership for $95 a year,” essentially eliminating the need for a monthly TTC pass.
Regarding Toronto’s municipal elections, “It’s going to be close and it’s the voter turnout that’s going to decide it.” He points to the recent Calgary municipal elections, a close mayoral race with more than 40% voter turnout, including a substantial increase in the number of young voters. “That’s probably one of the biggest challenges they have, just finding people who are going to actually vote. The advance poll numbers indicate that the turnout is going to be higher, which is great, but those volunteers that are going to be out on Monday are going to have to work really, really hard, in all campaigns, to get the vote level.”
When asked of his political aspirations down the road, Drew replies, “It would be hard for any young person to have been around the types of people that I have been around with—Bill Graham, Bob Rae, George Smitherman, now Glen Murray—to have been exposed to some pretty significant elections and issues and debates, not to have an interest in one day running myself. But at this point, I really want to feel like I’ve accomplished something for the community in the planning sense. I’m not going to be a political staffer for the rest of my life, but my ultimate goal, my passion is planning. I love planning.”
In his private time, Drew is volunteering to help establish the Church-Wellesley Neighbourhood Association. Almost every other corner of Toronto-Centre has some form of neighbourhood association, but “Right now, where I live, I’m not currently represented by a neighbourhood association.”
Chris Drew is up and coming and definitely the one to watch.
