The Ben Mulroney Show - Toronto Councillor Lily Cheng -- an honest conversation about building cities

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

-Councillor Lily Cheng - Toronto Willowdale   If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms��⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠ Twitter: ⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠ TikTok: ⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠ Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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It literally keeps the economy moving. Payroll professionals do a lot for us. You know, it's about time we do something for them. How about we ask our leaders to name a day in their honor, a national day to recognize payroll professionals? I got it. This is perfect. Why don't we explain to people just how important the role

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Sounds like a plan, you know, just one thing. What's that? I'm choosing the music. What? And I'm sitting in the back seat. The whole way? The whole way. Welcome back to the Ben Mulanish.

I should say welcome to the Ben Mulroney show. It's the 12th of September. I think it's Friday, right? Yes, thank you so much for being here. We appreciate it. Hey, very big news. The assassin, Charlie Kirk's assassin, is reportedly in custody. The alleged assassin turned in by his father.

We're going to have more on that story as it develops. And just because he has been named and his name is Tyler Robinson. we learn more, of course, we will share it with you here on the Ben Mulroney show. All right, in our ongoing attempt to have a national discussion about issues that are affecting our cities, I'm joined now by Councillor Lili Chang here from the City of Toronto Award 18 Willardale. Thank you very much for being here, counselor. Good morning, Ben. I appreciate you joining us here.

And it's important for us to share stories from city counselors to the rest of the country because someone in Vancouver might hear this show and get an insight from you or someone out there might realize that we're all, we all have the same challenges from city to city, and those are the things that bind us together. So that's one of the reasons I want to have these conversations. But I'm just meeting you for the first time. And to our viewers and our listeners, I saw a side of a city councilor I did not expect to see because our previous guest was Sarah McLaughlin. And you kind of fangirled a little bit. Yes, so I think I was more nervous when I saw her than I was about meeting you. I'm sorry to say, but I grew up just listening to her music, attended Lilith Fair.

And she represented, I think, this important voice that was authentic. It was something that resonated and just the empowerment of the female voice at a time when that wasn't as common. Well, we were talking about that when she has spoken. in the past about issues that were important to her, that I could listen to her. And if I didn't agree with her, I would be taken aback by how magnanimous, how open of heart she was. And that's not necessarily the world we're living in. And you're a politician.

What do you think of the general tone of public discourse these days? I think that it is ill. We are unwell. And we can't have solutions unless we have honest conversations. but you almost can't have honest conversations anymore because everyone is so easily triggered. And I think that the root of that is that people are traumatized for various reasons. COVID, I think, had a big impact on just our overall psychological health.

And then you add to it just the way we consume media. Everyone is in their own echo chamber. Things just get stirred up very quickly. And it always goes to attacks and negativity. Yeah, and so much of it, and this is a byproduct of sort of how we consume the news, is that our politicians are oftentimes looking for either a sound bite or trying to solve a problem in a tweet or solve a problem in a post or attack somebody in 30 seconds or less because that's the attention span that we have. And if you think about it, if you went back, I don't know, 100 years ago, 150 years ago, people learned about

their presidents and prime ministers through newspapers. They read these long speeches, and through those speeches, they learned what their leaders were representing them on. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney's show. We are having an ongoing conversation, a national conversation about local issues here on the show. And here to talk about her ward in the city of Toronto is Councillor Lillie Chang from Ward 18, Willowdale. Thank you for your patience and sticking around with us. I want to jump right in

and I want, before we jump into the issue of shelters, which is a national conversation that we're having, talk to me about your ward. What kind of community is Willowdale? Willowdale is made up of primarily immigrants. We have along the North York Center area, 80% immigrants and 76% of whom are racialized. Many are Chinese, Iranian, and Korean. Those are the three big demographics. And then we have a big, you know, neighborhood of people who have been there since the beginning when it was more like a farmland. So it's grown rapidly, 145% growth in population in 20 years, which is faster than most neighborhoods. We're one of the four centers in Toronto. And we have the second largest concentration of office space outside of the downtown core.

So you've got, there's a, what you just told me is sort of a temporary shelter in, in your community, Toronto's Willowdale Welcome Center shelter, fairly big in terms of the numbers of people that it can house. That is, as you said, we said temporary, but we're now staring down the barrel of a number of new shelters that will be built around the city, I believe the total is six, and Willowdale is going to have one of those. And there's pushback from a number of different groups on how the city went about selecting these areas,

whether or not there was enough public discussion around them. What is the temperament in your community, in your ward about Willowdale being selected as one of the locations? So the goal is for the city to build 20 shelters in the next 10 years. So this is not just the six. and we need to meet the demand of what is happening. We have 10,000 people who are unhoused in the city, and every day over 200 people call to find a bed and are rejected.

So we're trying to solve a problem. In addition, we have very expensive hotel shelters that are running. We want to close those down because they're not just expensive. It's a bad model. The way the building is built, it doesn't actually work towards, I think, a better future for the people who are housed. there, nor is it a good impact on the surrounding neighborhoods. So we have many problems we're

trying to solve. Has your community bought into this, to this shelter? Or is it, because there are a couple of flashpoints in this city where the, where the citizens are saying, you didn't check with us. We don't like where you put it. Every time we try to contact whoever our city councilors, they don't pick up the phone. And it doesn't feel like, there's this, there's this thing that I learned in law school that the appearance of propriety is as important as propriety itself. If it doesn't look like it was above board, it doesn't matter if it was. People won't trust it. And you won't get the buy-in you want. Did you get the buy-in in Willowdale? So first of all, I just want to say I'm a city counselor where someone does answer the phone or real live human being. And other wards,

people call my office because someone actually answers the phone. But what is that? Some people make a big decision, and then they duck the accountability that I think city councillors should be expected to give. To be fair, Torontoians are the least represented in Canada because we get 120,000 constituents per city councilor. In a lot of cities of that same size, you could get up to 11 city counselors and a mayor. So that accessibility is definitely challenged. It's a numbers thing. We just have limited time. But with regard to the reception around the shelter, you know, it's never going to be just one answer. Are there people who are

panicking, angry? Yes, we have those. We also have a group of people who are receptive and positive and hoping to be collaborative in a good outcome. I am, you know, I've had my moments where it's been difficult because people are very angry. But I think, you know, my posture has always been to not vilify people when they bring up their valid concerns. And I think that's one of the things that when you have a lot of people who are driven by ideology and they shut people down, that's not my approach. My approach is I will never call someone nimbie. I will take in all the questions and answer as authentically as I can. Do I have some reservations and trepidations, 100% I do. But I think in our community, one exciting thing is that we will be the

first Toronto hosted indigenous women and children's shelter. So no other shelter will have this combination of demographic that I think is underserved in the city and does need this safe space. So I want to just go on record as saying, I believe that you can tell everything you need to know about a city by how we treat those who need our help the most. So in me, you're going to have a staunch advocate for having a robust system of shelters across the city where I where I feel the problem is is in a hell-bent ideology around harm reduction that I don't I don't know that we've solved that problem I think you can make the argument when we had someone smoking crack right outside this window just a few weeks ago to go to the point that Alex Pearson had to go out

and interview that person to find out what what made them tick I don't know that we solve the problem. I suspect that depending on who you talk to, the situation has either hasn't changed or has gotten worse in this city. And so the fact that those two things are so intertwined when we have this discussion means I have to take a position of cynicism, right? Like, is the city sort of using the cover of our requirement to take care of those who need it most in the shelter system to keep feeding this harm reduction ideology that I take issue with. Right. So ironically or interestingly enough, the other day I did visit an abstinence-only shelter,

and one gentleman said to me, this shelter has saved my life. I haven't done drugs in X number of months, and I wouldn't have been able to do it in any other shelter. And I thought to myself, well, why do we not have more of these? because I know that in my ward, you know, we've been helping an older gentleman, a senior, who unfortunately lost his daughter in a terrible airplane crash. So he has no longer has family who would have taken care of him. And now, you know, he's struggling with being homeless and he went into a regular shelter

and he was petrified because here's an elderly Iranian gentleman who, you know, just needs a safe place to sleep. But when you have people who are, you know, bringing their very complex problems into your living space, he, you know, opted to sleep at Mel Lastman Square because that was safer for him. So I think we need more diversity in how shelters are delivered. And I believe that abstinence-only shelters would help. Yeah. Well, you know, I'm glad to hear that. I'm very glad to hear that. We only have a few minutes left, and so I kind of want to broaden out the conversation into the topic of civic engagement. There is no level of government that touches people in their everyday life more significantly, more importantly, more meaningfully than city politics.

And yet we consistently have such low voter turnout for elections. The mayoral by-election was dismayingly low. How do we remind people that if they want to affect change, whatever change that is in their mind, that they have to get out and vote. What do we do to mobilize people? Well, I actually think the message is not just get out and vote because democracy is not just that vote. Democracy is showing up to community meetings and consultations, reading your counselor's email newsletters, getting engaged in the issues and participating in every way that is presented to you, that matters to you. So to me, we have gone to

great lengths as a city councilor. I host spaghetti town halls. Why? Because I know people are busy. Who makes the spaghetti? We have a team of volunteers and, you know, one of my staff got food handling certification. You have to live in Willowdale to come to one of these things? Because I've got to tell you. Someone offers me free spaghetti. I'm going to take it. You are invited. I'd love to. Yeah, we have six a year, one in every neighborhood in Willowdale. So we are going to great lengths. We hand fly our neighborhoods when there are speed humps coming down your street. We want to make sure people know and that they can voice their opinions. So it's very important, but it's not just about the vote. Lastly, an election is coming up next year. Are you going to be on the ballot?

I believe so. I think it takes a long time to bring change to a complex city, and I've only just begun. Counselor Chang, I want to thank you for coming. Please know that this seat is open to you anytime there are issues that need to be discussed in the city. I thank you for your patience. I thank you for your insights, and I thank you for the honest conversation. Thank you, Ben. With a Subaru, a vehicle that's built to last come standard. Heated front seats, standard. High ground clearance, standard. Eyesight driver assists to help spot the scooter delivery guy texting, merging, and eating all at once.

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