All Fried Up In The Big Smoke

Less political. More fictional.

Rob Ford

Posted on March 24, 2016 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

I am sorry for your loss. 46 years of age is far too young to die. Cancer sucks. My condolences to the Ford family. Like all of them, I am sure, this is not how I wanted to see it end.

But I am thankful that, at least for the moment, it is over. The Rob Ford political/personal/family melodrama that has held the city of Toronto, a city of over 2.5 million residents, not some provincial backwoods, hillside, Hatfield-McCoy hamlet, in its dense, thick thrall for more than half a decade now has concluded. With the passing, perhaps, we can get on with having an honest debate about local governance and decision-making in the 21^st-century.

As someone who only observed Rob Ford from the outside, never meeting him in person except to shake his hand once in the greeting line at one of his Ford Fest gatherings, my relationship with him is not at all complicated or complex. He was a terrible mayor, an awful local politician. His approach to representation functioned in the bleak zone of willful ignorance and stubborn self-certainty. If something conformed to his stunted, myopic world view, it must be right. Anything else was brushed aside as gravy.

That streetcar blocking the lane in front of him on his way to work must be the source of all congestion, everywhere in the city.

He leaves behind a legacy of belligerence, divisiveness, and a disdain for politicians, the bureaucracy and the political process itself. His 15+ years of public service was of the easiest kind. Push peoples’ buttons, get them angry, howl for simple solutions and lie about everything that could not be squared with reality. Millions became billions. Facts observed and acknowledged only when convenient.

The customer is always right, retail politics that Rob Ford mastered boiled down to nothing more than What can I do for you? The idea of What can I do for us? was an anathema to his political calculations. He was looking out for the little guy, gave voice to those left out of the civic discourse, as long as they saw things the way he did, said the same things he said.

Rob Ford is credited with alerting the otherwise unaware, largely downtown elite crowd to the alienated, angry, outsider voices of the inner suburbs. This is true although it hardly tells the whole truth. People were, and continue, to be angry. People weren’t being listened to or, more exactly, people weren’t being consulted, engaged with. There was indeed a certain smugness, let’s call it, at City Hall, a belief that people knew their best interests were being looked after. Bigger picture thinking was at work. The small details don’t matter.

Which turned out to be a near-fatal political mindset.

Speaking for myself, back in 2010, it wasn’t surprising many people were angry. I miscalculated the degree of anger. But mostly, I was caught off-guard that that anger so identified itself with Rob Ford and attached itself so strongly to him.

He appropriated the anger, giving it voice but no solutions. He had no interest in channeling it constructively, only in amplifying it incoherently and destructively. His Ford Nation wasn’t so much a cohesive ideology as it was pure demagoguery of blind resentment.

I don’t doubt anyone’s account of the human side of Rob Ford, his warmth, playfulness and generosity. While not at all getting the political charm of Rob Ford, others clearly did. You could watch him amiably chatting with kids in the council chambers. His enthusiasm bubbled over when he talked about things he loved, like football. That’s where the Everyman label got affixed to him.

That only proves anything if you adhere to a totality of behaviour of personality. Somebody is one thing or the other, and being one negates the other. But no one’s all saint, just as sure as nobody’s a complete shit bird.

Read through Karen Geier’s Remember these Rob Ford Gems?, compiled shortly after Ford re-emerged from what would not uncharitably be called a politically motivated rehab stint. None of it refuted. Christopher Bird’s Torontoist obituary similarly dismantles any notion of a well-intentioned but flawed character. Rob Ford seemed especially adept at one thing. Wreaking havoc. He left others to try and pick up the pieces of everything he broke.

Any notion of Rob Ford as a one-of-a-kind politician, there’ll never be another one like him again is a form of civic self-flattery. A singular political phenomenon we could never fall for again.

There will always be political opportunists. There’ll always be the possibility of another Ford. Pretending he was something he wasn’t only makes the possibility even more likely.

As we’ve seen, that would be disastrous for Toronto.

All of this in no way means I am happy he died. I am sorry for his death. I am sorry for those most affected by it. A death like he suffered will invariably leave a huge hole, a void in the lives of those closest to him.

What I am not sorry about, when all is said and done, is that I will never have to write about Rob Ford again.

— submitted by Cityslikr

Pacific Standard Time

Posted on January 27, 2016 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

So here’s how it happened.

I was at my doctor’s, checking in for my annual checking up. To see what condition my condition was in. (I am of that age, yes.) Everything but my attitude came out just fine.

“You have the heart of a 57 year-old man,” my MD informed me.

“But I’m only 54.”

“A very healthy 57 year-old man,” the doc said, as if somehow… Never mind. That’s beside the point of this particular story.

Like I said, I was not feeling particularly ebullient at this juncture. It could be just a case of the post-holiday, January blues, my doctor suggested. “SAD, maybe.” He told me to seek out some light, shine it on the darkness.

“The days are getting longer.”

While I felt comfortable leaving my physical health in this man’s hands, I was less inclined to adhere to his mental health diagnosis. I knew the January blahs. I’d never been prone to the deeper seasonal affective disorder, and wasn’t entirely sure why I might be now.

No. This was different. I didn’t feel sad or depressed or down in the dumps. I was just angry. Anger mixed with an occasional dose of despair. Angrair. Despry.

“What on earth do you have to be angry about?” my doctor asked me. “You’re a healthy, middle-aged man with no family history of prostate cancer. You know how many people would be ecstatic about that prognosis? Get your angry ass out of my office.” A little too dismissive, I thought as I headed down the hallway toward the receptionist’s desk to make an appointment for my next physical a year from now. But not entirely without merit.

I have very little to be angry about, let alone despair. Aside from all that creeping mortality business that begins to make a serious appearance when your life’s well more than half over. I know, I know. 55 is the new 25 and all that. That’s what the kid’s are saying these days, isn’t it?

Still. You do reach an age when you always think before getting down to shovel the snow from the walk, Will this be my last shovel of snow? Dying with your winter boots on.

That said, in my medical opinion, this wasn’t really about my impending death. It had more to do, in my humble opinion, with what I was doing with my dwindling time here on earth. Pounding your head ceaselessly against a wall doesn’t feel like a productive use of your time. I’m not sure it ever did. It’s just started to feel especially useless at this point in my life.

And let’s face, that’s what I’ve been doing, have been doing for at least a year now here at All Fired Up in the Big Smoke. When the Ford’s were defeated back in October 2014, I imagined myself stepping back from the fray, the political side of things, to concentrate on the stuff that really interested me. The nuts and bolts of building a better, fairer, more sustainable city. Lots of the nerdy, geeky stuff I didn’t know enough about but wanted to learn in more detail.

Obviously, that’s not what happened. While I never entertained the highest of hopes in John Tory, I never thought he’d flounder as much as he has. Competent if not inspirational or reform-minded, I’d hoped, for no other reason than hoping for less would be too soul crushing to imagine.

Maybe he has turned a corner with his recent conversion on the public transit file. Maybe not. Maybe competency is possible! I don’t know and, frankly, it just makes me angry and despairing more than a little that that’s the straw I’m left clutching at. Maybe our mayor may just be less worse than he was shaping up to be.

Huzzah and hurrah!

Angrair. Despry.

Which brings me to the point of all of this, if you’re still following along.

LA, CA. Los Angeles, California. Swimming pools and movie stars. That’s the place I ought to be.

Until April, at any rate. Until the snow begins to retreat. Until it’s baseball season again

It’s an enforced step back that I could not execute under close proximity. A little breathing space. Some distance.

Now, there’s a little history between Los Angeles and me. This ain’t my first… a-hem, a-hem… Rodeo… Drive. LA and I go back some.

Back to the early-90s, when I had dreams of being a big time sitcom writer. (Don’t believe everything you read in the About section of any blog. Hell, you might not want to believe anything I’m writing right now.) I had my Home Improvement and Murphy Brown spec scripts tucked under my arm, and made my way south and westward to find the kind of fame and fortune that is so lavishly heaped upon screenwriters. Swimming pools, movie stars.

The early-90s turned out to be an interesting time to live in Los Angeles. Fires, floods, riots, lurid celebrity murders, surreal police car chases and trials, earthquakes. Did I miss anything? A “string of disruptions and upheavals, both natural and civil,” as David L. Ulin, who moved to LA from the east about the same time as I had, describes it in his recent book, Sidewalking.

With my career plans not panning out like I’d hoped and the city I was pursuing them in feeling more and more like Old Testament times, I decided to cut and run back home to Toronto, never to return but twice. In 1995 to pitch a sitcom pilot to the Seinfeld production company, Castle Rock, the closest I would come to a full on sitcom career, and not again for nearly 20 years, a couple years back, on nothing more than an extended long weekend visit.

A funny thing happened in those ensuing two decades. I had begun writing about city and urban issues, albeit one city in particular but not without some wider overlap, and Los Angeles, for its part, had started taking on some of those same urban issues. When I left the city in the fall of 1994, there was one light rail line and a 5 station stubway, largely serving downtown LA. Outside of that, it was buses operated by a litany of municipalities that make up Los Angeles County. It was generally acknowledged that to live in LA, you drove in LA.

Today, the city has two subway lines, consisting of 22 stations and 4 light rail lines serving nearly 70 stations with further expansion right around the corner. It’s pushing dedicated bus lanes in other under-served areas. In the kingdom of the private automobile, the last two mayors of Los Angeles have seemed serious about pursuing mobility alternatives to the car.

During that same time span, Toronto has what? Built a stubway of its own after having buried a previous project already underway. Converted a couple streetcar lines into their own ROWs without any other sort of traffic priority. There’s another subway extension in progress and only a couple years from completion. The Eglinton Crosstown LRT is still 4 years away.

And plans for more. Plans, lots of plans. Always with the plans.

You see what I’m talking about here?

We need a little break, me and Toronto. A trial separation. If you can’t say anything good, then maybe don’t say anything at all. Shut it down and open up space for other, more constructive, voices to speak up and be heard.

Settle in for a spell, down here in Southern California. Take in how another city is attempting to deal with the 21^st-century. Don’t get caught up in the politics of it all. Just observe and report. What’s working. What’s not. Why and why not.

Maybe try to learn a thing or two instead of driving myself and everyone else crazy with the know-it-all pose. Stop being so angry and try to embrace the whole mellow thing. At least for a couple months. A little change of perspective might go a long way to brightening my outlook when I get back home.

— dreamingly submitted by Cityslikr

Bully Budgeting

Posted on January 14, 2016 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

It was just a coincidence, I’m sure, that I was reading through Torontoist’s 2015 Heroes and Villains list while listening to the first of the public deputations on the 2016 budget. (Truth be told, I’d held out following the annual Torontoist series as, once again, I’d been snubbed despite my unrelenting and uncompromising work covering the politics of this city. Hero or Villain. It didn’t matter to me. Just a little recognition might be nice, Torontoist.) As it so happened, I was just getting to the final reveal – Superhero of the Year – when the library workers union president, Maureen O’Reilly, sat down to speak to the budget committee.

No, really. That’s exactly how it happened. Sometimes life can be that serendipitous.

Read what Eva Hd wrote about the Toronto Public Library, in nominating it as Superhero of the Year:

The individual branches’ lovingly curated and topical displays, whether tying in to contemporary political issues such as Idle No More or featuring mystery Valentine books wrapped in red tissue paper for February 14, always amaze and amuse. On any given day, TPL’s librarians can be heard giving tips to adolescents on how to find books and movies about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, showing seniors how to use the internet, guiding researchers through the archives, and telling homeless people where to find the bathroom with equal amounts of patience and grace, while the security guards interact respectfully with everyone and will often be seen helping out at kids’ story time.

Now here’s David Nickle writing about Maureen O’Reilly’s budget committee deputation:

“It’s 2016. It’s no longer acceptable to underpay the ladies of the library and to continually cut them.”

O’Reilly was referring to the Toronto Public Library Board’s recommendation to save $250,000 by cutting 6.7 full-time equivalent page positions – a move that would mean between 12 and 14 of the minimum-wage pages would lose their jobs.

The pages, said Reilly, are bearing much of the weight of a cut in library staffing that she said amounts to 25 per cent since 1992. The position of page was traditionally a part-time job for high school students, but currently, the average age of a page at Toronto Public Library is 43. They do the work of reshelving materials and helping at checkouts.

That’s what you call working ‘harder and smarter’ with less. It’s just what budget hawks like our mayor (like so many mayors before him) love to hear, love to tout. See, Toronto. We continue to nick and cut at library services, and they still keep providing exemplary service to residents of this city. It can be done!

Libraries, and those who work so diligently to make them the key community hubs that they are, represent the kind of soft services line-by-line, always searching for efficiencies, nickel-and-dime politicians love to go after. Easy targets. Libraries don’t directly provide life-or-death support to residents. They aren’t grand infrastructure symbols elected officials can cut ribbons at.

Actually, that’s not quite true. Almost any politician who isn’t a Ford – Doug was convinced there were more libraries than Tim Horton’s in his ward and would’ve slashed them ‘in heartbeat’ — loves to oversee the building of a library. The 100^th TPL branch was opened in Scarborough last year. It’s the funding of their operations that’s so tempting to shave, trim and hack at.

So, working at the library for many falls into the precarious employment category. Half of the workers are contracted, meaning benefits, a living wage and the like are but a pipedream. At Tuesday’s budget deputations, library worker Tori MacDonald talked about scrambling to branches all over the city in the search of hours. For Ms. MacDonald, the librarian’s lot in Toronto was not one where she could see buying a home, raising a family.

Bully for them, those of us with plenty of space at home to find a quiet spot to work, with easy access to all the internet we need, with that book we want one Amazon click away, with our own communities already carved out, will say. What’s a librarian’s job anyway? Checking out books. Putting them back on the shelves when they’re returned. Why should we pay a premium for that?

But read the Torontoist piece and realize that our library system represents much more than that to many residents of this city. In fundamentally important ways, our libraries and those (wo)manning the desks, counters and stacks – Yes, 75% of library workers are female. Women and precarious employment. Surprise! — serve as, if not gatekeepers, then the welcoming committee of this city for newcomers and other oftentimes marginalized segments of our community. Libraries provide both a physical as well as social shelter for this city.

How much should that be worth to us?

It’s easy to embrace the big gestures, the grand symbols of our civic well-being. The shiny new transit projects and plans, the high rise office towers, the beautiful, “world class”, outside public spaces. What we always overlook, however, in our seemingly perpetual chest-beating, looking out for the taxpayer push to scrimp toward balanced budgets is the vital element of the human scale. “Finally,” Hd writes in the Torontoist, “TPL locations are also some of the last places in Toronto where you can still get a glass of water and use the bathroom for free, a not insignificant attribute in our increasingly precious metropolis.”

Our libraries and the people working to make them cornerstones of neighbourhoods and communities are indeed significant attributes ‘in our increasingly precious metropolis’. We need to defend them from those intent on only counting costs and ignoring the benefit side of the ledger. A strong library system is not simply a nice-to-have. It is a need-to-have, and we have to start treating it as such, beyond just the easy to spot and promote bricks-and-mortar, to the people inside, working to make it the remarkable enterprise it is.

— bookishly submitted by Cityslikr