All Fried Up In The Big Smoke

Less political. More fictional.

Yapping

Posted on June 20, 2016 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

So twice within the last 2 weeks, Scarborough Centre MPP and Economic Development Minister, Brad Duguid, has come forward to help bail out Mayor John Tory when bad news kept on coming about the proposed one-stop, “express” subway to the Scarborough Town Centre. “The critics, it’s time for them to take a rest,” he stated after news about woefully low projected ridership numbers broke earlier this month. Then this weekend, after the mayor took media heat over nearly a billion dollar increase in the project’s price tag, the provincial minister demanded that all the downtown elitists need to stop their yapping.

“I’m very confident the people of Scarborough will get their subway.”

And by ‘the people of Scarborough’, of course, Minister Duguid meant ‘the politicians of Scarborough’.

Ever since the Ford camp blared ‘Subways, Subways, Subways’, local politicians of all stripes and at all levels have basically co-opted the slogan rather than confront it. They have convinced themselves that campaigns have been fought and won on the subway issue as if it were the only variable that mattered to voters, city-wide, province-wide, country-wide. The Scarborough subway. The defining issue of every election since 2010.

So no matter how ridiculous the project gets the more planning that goes into it, no matter how much money the fucking thing’s going to cost, how damaging it’s going to be to the wider transit network, nothing is too good for the politicians people of Scarborough. They deserve another subway stop. If you stand opposed, it’s for no other reason than you hate Scarborough and refuse to take your elitist head out of your downtown ass.

Like one of those comic book movies with a cast of thousands of supervillains, it’s hard to pick your favourite bad guy in this sad saga. So many too choose from! The one irony in all this is that the guy who raised the curtain on this shitshow, the late Rob Ford, may have been the least worst offender. While always politically calculating, he seemed to actually believe, owing to his solid grounding in ignorance fed by an extreme disinterest in much to do with public transit, that if you were going to build public transit, subways were the only way to go. He didn’t know any better. Everybody else most surely does. They know, and they don’t care.

For me, the real face of this mess is Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker. There is no nonsense he won’t spout, no gratuitous shot he’s unwilling to take, no number too fabtabulist for him to cite in support of a Scarborough subway. He’s the go-to guy to say the questionable things that need to be said in order to push a major infrastructure project that otherwise possesses absolutely no merit. The kind of things that only someone lacking any sense of self-awareness or shame would be able to say with a straight face.

The thing is, Councillor De Baeremaeker wasn’t always a subway champion. He loved LRTs. He was a big fan of Transit City that promised to deliver more higher order transit to more people in Scarborough than either variation of a subway would.

Unfortunately, when push came to shove, Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker decided his political future was more important than the future of public transit in Toronto. He’s not alone. Liberal premiers, ministers, MPPs and MPs all took the easiest, most craven route, as did many of those running election campaigns against them. Mayor John Tory fell into place too.

It’s just Councillor De Baeremaeker’s conversion was so obvious, so unprincipled, so thoroughly… greasy, and he stands so smugly defiant in his posturing as Captain Scarborough that, while he’s certainly not the biggest player in this unfolding scandal, he’s most certainly its chief enabler.

Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker, 2016

(h/t @JohnToryWatch)

Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker, 2012

(h/t Himy Syed)

— sickeningly submitted by Cityslikr

How Not To Be A City Councillor

Posted on October 13, 2015 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

Recently, a Scarborough community of about 12 households took their fight to City Hall over plans to install sidewalks along their street. Yes, you read that correctly. Residents have been fighting the city over plans to install sidewalks.

This item, let us call it, first came to my notice when the local city councillor, Gary Crawford, tried to ix-nay hetay idewalksay at September’s Public Works and Infrastructure meeting. Rebuffed, it came back this month before finally being subdued and, hopefully, deep sixed for good last week after much commiserative mumbling from a few of the committee members. “I’m not a big fan of pavement myself,” said PWIC chair, Jaye Robinson.

How so very Joni Mitchell of her.

That the pushback even got this far along in the process is truly an abject lesson in pandering and How Not To Be A City Councillor. Listen to Councillor Crawford speaking up for his aggrieved dozen of households.

I fully support the construction of sidewalks, especially in my ward. I really do support sidewalks. But what I support is sidewalks that make sense. When you look at this particular little section, the community looked at the foot traffic and how busy that road is. They’ve indicated there’s very little foot traffic.

‘Sidewalks that make sense’.

Looking at this photo of Ramona Drive from the Scarborough Mirror, it’s hard not to conclude that, of course, there’s very little foot traffic. Who the hell would want to travel by foot along here? It basically screams, Stay Off My Lawn and Get In Your Car! After the committee vote, the Globe and Mail’s Oliver Moore asked Councillor Crawford why he thought the sidewalk issue was so ‘divisive’. “It’s partly because people have become accustomed to having/using the road allowance,” the councillor responded.

In other words, the residents of Ramona Drive don’t need sidewalks because they use the road to walk on. But it’s not really that pleasant walking on the road, so, unsurprisingly, there’s very little foot traffic. Therefore, we don’t need no stinkin’ sidewalks!

Never mind the fact that the sidewalks would be put in on city property, so it’s not really up to residents to say yes or no to them. The installation is being coordinated with the replacement of watermains in order to keep construction time to a minimum and, hopefully, save some money in the process. Like it or not, this is just something that comes with living in a city. You want untouched bucolic where you collect your water from a stream and shit in an outhouse? There are places you can move to for that even without building a time machine to travel back to. Toronto, even Scarborough, isn’t one of them.

Another complaint from the residents was that the city didn’t consult enough with them beforehand, to come up with some sort of compromise, a more sensible sidewalk, I guess. This is often a legitimate complaint from people in dealing with the city about city plans but I do get the sense that on this one that from staff’s position what was there to consult about? They’re putting in a sidewalk, for fuck’s sake. Who’s going to have a problem with that?

Apparently, residents of Ramona Drive, Scarborough, Toronto. That’s who.

Interceding with and navigating the often times antagonistic dynamic between City Hall and city residents is part of the job of being a city councillor. That doesn’t mean always siding with the public because it’s the politically expedient thing to do. An angry constituent means a hostile voter. If people living on Ramona Drive weren’t notified in a timely fashion, the blame ultimately should lie with their councillor, and this whole ridiculous business feels like a councillor scrambling to the defense of his residents in order to keep up appearances. Councillor Crawford wants people to know he isn’t against sidewalks, in theory. He’s just against this sidewalk, in practice, because these 12 households are against it.

Hedges have been built, Councillor Crawford points out. We can’t just bulldoze over front yards because people have been operating under the misconception that their property was their property even when it isn’t. People must be indulged, in other words, not enlightened or guided in the right direction. By doing just that, Councillor Crawford helps to exacerbate the animosity and feeling of alienation residents can feel toward City Hall rather than do his best to try and smooth over the relationship.

That wasn’t what he was elected to do.

— submitted by Cityslikr

InGloriaLindsayLubyous

Posted on May 16, 2014 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

Goddammit!

Can we please stop having this fucking conversation?

All due respect, nobody in this ill-arranged shotgun of a marriage we call amalgamated Toronto is getting screwed, is getting more than their share, isn’t getting anything in return for what they put in.

Once again today, Councillor Gloria Lindsay Luby went to the resentment well in defence of her no road tolls and just let my neighbourhoods be stance.

“Etobicoke already pays a lot but doesn’t always get its fair share in return,” she tweeted. “True in transit, sewer, roads, other services.”

This has been a regular lament from the councillor since she became more active on social media during this, not coincidentally I imagine, a municipal election year. Divide and conquer. Us versus them. That it’s simply not true is of little concern, it seems. Just say it enough times and it develops a ring of truth.

I mean, what kind of person would keep repeating a factual inaccuracy again and again?

As we have written here numerous times previously, way back in 2008 then just plain ol’ regular Councillor Norm Kelly commissioned a report, Fair Share Scarborough, to see if, well, Scarborough was getting its fair share of city services over the first decade of amalgamation. While not exhaustive or conclusive, it certainly pointed in the direction that Scarborough was not getting the short end of the stick although you wouldn’t know it, having listened to the Scarborough subway debate over the last year and a half.

Now, unless Councillor Lindsay Luby has evidence to the contrary, we should assume that none of the former municipalities are getting shafted in terms of who’s getting what. Saying otherwise, with no numbers to back up such a claim, is nothing more than cheap parochial politicking. It exhibits a startling lack of leadership and contributes nothing more than discord to our civic discourse.

A while back, friend of All Fired Up in the Big Smoke, Himy Syed gave us a theory about the suburban-urban divide plaguing Toronto. The biggest political wound this city received from amalgamation was the loss of the Metro level of government. It was the pan-416 institution every one of the former municipalities could band to together to rail against. Damn you Metro council, they could say, shaking a fist at Metro Hall.

With that gone, collective anger was re-directed toward Toronto City Hall. It became the target of all that wasn’t working. We pay our taxes there. What do we get in return?

Maybe I’m wrong in assuming that’s what Councillor Lindsay Luby is doing. Downtown gets everything and we get nothing. Maybe she’s actually suggesting Etobicoke subsidizes York, North York, East York, Scarborough and not just the old legacy city of Toronto.

Any way you cut it, her tactic is not any more constructive than it is true. And as long as we keep electing this type of tribal representation, we are doomed to continue rehashing these false arguments and petty antagonisms over and over and over again. In her misguided and outdated defense of Etobicoke, Councillor Gloria Lindsay Luby is working to the detriment of the city as a whole.

— fed uply submitted by Cityslikr