Q: What is Community Recreation For All?
AK: Community Recreation for All is a group of community organizations and residents across the city and we are concerned about access to our community centres and recreation programs.
Q: The proposed budget will eliminate free registered programs for children and youth. What are some of the recreation programs that the city funds?
AK: Right now there are 134 community centres across Toronto and 21 of these are called priority centres and just to clarify they’re not related to priority neighbourhoods. They’re scattered across the city.
A priority centre and priority neighbourhood are two different things. The priority centres were established in 1999 long before there were priority neighbourhoods, not all the priority neighbourhoods have them. Priority Centres until 2011 were free for everyone, adults, youth, seniors, and community spaces were free.
Programs include swimming, skating, art, free swim, computer skills, leadership training, fitness, sport, sewing. It’s a real range depending on the kind of programs they run.
Q: Why are these recreation programs important?
They’re important for a variety of reasons. I’m focused on access. I think the nature of the program is important, but I think having people able to access community centre when and where they need it without barriers is extremely important.
Physical exercise, a sense of belonging to a community is very important. For children and youth being around adult mentors is very important. A lot of parents use this as child care, it’s key to employment. For parents and adults it’s a way of relieving stress. It’s a way of relieving isolation.
I just moved into a neighbourhood that doesn’t have a city recreation centre. You want to arrive in a neighbourhood and say hi I’m here. Where can I go to meet my neighbourhoods and get some exercise. There’s a pool in the neighbourhood that they want to close.
In the neighbourhood where I work. The community centre is the hub of the neighbourhood. I’m there all the time, not just because I’m there for work. But I’m there because I can see the other workers and the people in the neighbourhood. I can watch children grow up and get a sense of what’s going on. I personally feel a sense of belonging there. And there’s incredible beautiful layers of activity happening. There’s dance, there’s swimming, there’s community meetings, there’s basketball and community picnics.
Unfortunately, it’s not a priority centre, when you see fees applied, you see some of the activity ebbing away. For example they put a fee on the pool a year ago for free swim. In the summer, we saw more kids outside than inside, and that pool just sat there. We started to see more charges for community space. It’s very difficult if you are a community group now to get space in the community centre. It’s very difficult especially if you don’t have insurance. If you add those barriers on to priority centres, it’s a mess.
I think everyone needs a physical place to go that is a bigger place than themselves and see their neighbours, and be with other generations and be part of the community. I don’t think the city understands that these are our community centres.
Q: Park and Recreation are proposing to increase user fees by 13%. Some people have suggested an ability to pay structure. What are the advantages of universal access?
AK: The advantages of universal access is you can walk into a community centre and use the program. The advantage in the case of 12,700 youth is you have to go to your parents and say: ‘Are you low-income enough mom and dad for us to access these programs?’ And ask your parents to take their private papers to a city worker to be scrutinized and maybe you do hear back and maybe you don’t hear back.
There’s an 80% chance, that even if you are approved you’re not going to get the program. That’s not a good process to put anyone through, let alone children and youth. So the advantage of universality is your not going through that process. The advantage of universality is you are welcome into your community centre with no questions asked.
Even if you were going to propose that dichotomy, we don’t have an ability to pay structure. We have a subsidy program with a waiting list of 80,000 people. What the city is going to do to those 12,000 youth is they’re asking them to get in line behind 80,000 people. They’re sending them to a subsidy program that isn’t there.
If you are going to believe in an ability to pay program, we should at least have an ability to pay program that works. We don’t have a universal program and we don’t have a subsidy program, then we don’t have access.
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