1. Why does David Miller so rarely smile? It is a rare sight indeed to see our mayor’s mouth curl upward with delight or enthusiasm. Maybe it’s just the effect I have on him when I’m in the room. Maybe he’s hiding some bad dental work. But my best guess is that he takes himself too seriously. He has a patrician air about him and, in this sense, he merely reflects the city he governs. There are no laughing matters in Toronto. To wit: I am a regular reader of the Spacing Wire, a communal blog written by a bunch of young urbanites. At its best it’s full of good information, sometimes useful, sometimes arcane. At its worst, the posts read like a bunch of Prince Charles lectures on architecture (and urban design and planning and cycling and walking and trees and park benches and on and on). This city needs to lighten up and poke some fun at itself.

2. Why the hell is the city rebuilding my street? Last month city contractors showed up and starting tearing up and replacing sidewalks on my street, a prelude to resurfacing the road. It’s been great fun for the local kids to watch, and the crews themselves have been cordial and pleasant—except, of course, for the two-week period in which they left two stinking, rotting bags of takeout-lunch trash on the sidewalk, which the garbage collectors conveniently managed to ignore. But here’s the thing: no one who lives on my street thinks our sidewalks needed rebuilding. One neighbour summed it up like so: “I’d rather see the money spent to keep pools open.” A transportation department with a state-of-good-repair backlog of $310 million can apparently afford to fix what ain’t broke.

3. Why isn’t Kyle Rae mayor yet? There are a number of city councillors who ought to run for mayor in either 2010 or 2014. Among them (and what they would bring to a campaign): Adam Vaughan (independent thinking), Karen Stintz (crisp debates), Denzil Minnan-Wong (salesmanship), Shelley Carroll (honesty, integrity, a funny bone), Rob Ford (chaos). But the one city councillor who, more than all of the above, ought to be mayor is Kyle Rae. I say this not just because it’s pride week, nor because Rae has won me over with his charm—in fact he’s quite prickly, and of late won’t even return my calls (bitch!)—but because he, more than anyone else, would plainly be good at it. He has been on council since 1991, so he knows the institution inside and out (including, no doubt, where all the bodies are buried). He has a passion for architecture and design. He understands what 21st-century cities must do to grow and to attract business. He picks his battles carefully, then fights to win. He is witty, which is the kind of humour that doesn’t ruffle patrician sensibilities. My suspicion is that he doesn’t want the job. My hunch is that he should have it. And I’ll leave it at that. Bye.

The councillor does have a point. Queen’s Park estimates that the population of the GTA will increase by 2.6 million people over the next 20-odd years. It’s nice to think that all 2.6 million people will walk, cycle or take transit to work, but the truth is that they won’t. People don’t have much control over where their next job is located, and in two-income households the common trade-off is for one partner to take public transit and the other to drive. Even if 70 per cent of those 2.6 million don’t drive, that still puts an additional 780,000 cars on the road for rush hour. And since a lot of those 2.6 million people—and many of those extra cars—will be residing on redeveloped waterfront land, they would benefit most from the Gardiner’s continued nearby presence. After all, part of what makes the condo developments along Sheppard so attractive to buyers is their proximity to both transit and an expressway (in that case, the 401). As I have argued before, if the city so desired, it could make the elevated expressway part of a walkable community’s urban form. Even a walkable city makes good use of expressways for cars.

• Gardiner teardown gets another green light [National Post]• There are reasons to keep the Gardiner [Toronto Life]

• Toronto police to add 26 officers to high-crime areas [CBC]• With open arms, police welcome this year’s summer of violence [Toronto Life]

The section of High Park known as Dog Hill has been cordoned off by police after two dogs died and a number of others fell ill from ingesting what appears to be liquid antifreeze. The incident comes four years after a series of dog poisonings in Withrow Park caused by pesticide-laced wieners. That crime was never solved, and the whole thing now has a certain Unabomber-esque intrigue to it. Toronto may have a Canikiller on its hands, striking without warning, then lying in wait for years before mounting another sneak attack. And if so, here is an appeal to the perpetrator: please feel free to forward your wacked-out, manifesto-ish screed of complaints and demands to the Toronto Life offices. City State will publish it in full, not because your cause is righteous—it’s heinous—but because we’re all curious.

Ever since the Withrow poisonings, Toronto’s dogs-versus-people debate has been a heated one. The Dog Hill poisonings have now made it one of the defining civic issues of our time. Toronto is a city for people, but is it a city for dogs? Does our embrace of diversity extend to four-legged creatures? Tensions constantly run high. Earlier this spring I witnessed a scene at Withrow’s dog run, which is located in a tiny valley flanked by two steep hills. A few kids on mountain bikes were having fun weaving through the trees, zipping down into the dog pit and climbing back up the other side. The dogs were distracted by the action and their owners were clearly upset. Eventually the cyclists were silently but sternly shooed away by the dog people’s sense of entitlement, but since Withrow’s off-leash area isn’t fenced in, my sympathies were with the cyclists. Imagine: off-leash children harassing dogs! I am one of those people whose love of dogs has been tempered by parenthood. After a couple of frightening encounters between unleashed, panting slobberers and my infant son, I favour enforcement of leash laws, mandatory obedience training and fenced-in dog runs.

Obviously I don’t favour dog poisoning. Nevertheless, the Dog Hill incident threatens to push the issue into the realm of the absurd. The story in the Toronto Star said the cops were considering an increased presence at Dog Hill. Police protection for pets? Here’s hoping they can track down the Canikiller fast, because between the shootings, the stabbings and the handing out of infractions to rogue TTC drivers, the cops have lots of more urgent priorities to deal with.

• 2 dogs die from poisoning [Toronto Star]

The bag, packed with the exact same contents as for the departure flight, weighed 59 pounds. But what passed muster in Toronto didn’t in Calgary: the attendant explained that the weight limit per bag was 50 pounds, and he would have to charge me $50 right there, on the spot, before he’d let my bag go through. They let it pass in Toronto, I said. They must have just missed it, he said. No, I said, I travel through Pearson regularly, and we always pack this way, and they’ve never raised the matter. I told him I thought it was deceitful of Air Canada to send me to Calgary with a 59-pound bag, then try to wring an extra 50 bucks out of me to get it home. I felt like I was trying to fly out of some Latin American backwater: “Grease my palm, hombre, or I’ll tie you up and you’ll miss your flight.”

I crossed my arms, stood there and said nothing. I wasn’t going to try to guess my way to a solution, and I was happy to tie up the rest of the check-in line until he came up with one. After three tense minutes, he eventually gave me one of those thick plastic bags, which I dumped the dirty laundry into and checked separately. Then he informed me that, starting July 15, Air Canada will be charging $25 for a second piece of luggage.

Meanwhile, once on the plane, I paid $5 for a pizza that, for roughly the same price, I can get in boxes of 10 from No Frills. These are all Fuel Surcharges by Other Names, and Air Canada is determined to charge them at every opportunity. Join the fun and post your Air Canada horror story below.

• Air Canada cutting 2,000 jobs, trimming capacity [CBC]• Down-to-earth ways sought to cut airlines’ soaring costs [National Post]

City Councillor Rob Ford would make a terrible mayor, but that doesn’t mean he’d make a terrible mayoral candidate. Here at City State, because we enjoy political spectacle, we are openly encouraging him to mount a campaign. One fellow hack in the city hall press gallery said a Ford candidacy would unleash a “public shit show.” The most likely result of such a campaign would be that we’d get to watch Ford hang himself. But there is some evidence that Ford can be a crafty politician at times, and he could make life uncomfortable for his opponents. To give you some idea, I dug up this clip of Ford debating Mayor David Miller last September, in which Ford manages to drive Miller bananas.

To put the clip in context, it is taken from council proceedings last September 26, in the midst of the controversy over last summer’s cuts to city services. The city had already announced that community centres would be closed on Mondays, but at council that day, Miller tabled a motion to reopen them—and the knives were out for him. According to council’s rules of procedure, every councillor was allowed to grill him for a full five minutes (which is an eternity compared to the paltry few seconds that opposition MPs get during Question Period in Ottawa). It was probably Miller’s toughest day on council in his entire tenure as mayor, but he handled himself well in the hot seat—until Ford’s turn came.

Watching the video, it’s hard to tell if Ford is an honest-to-goodness rube or just playing the role. On the surface, he seems to be merely hacking away at his usual hobby horses: overspending and perks. But whether by design or by accident, he manages to disguise complicated questions as simple ones, then looks down his nose at His Worship’s appropriately complicated reasoning. Miller, who is smarter than anyone on council, cracks under questioning from his inferior, displaying both his temper and his sense of entitlement. If I were George Smitherman—or, at least, the version of George Smitherman in some parallel universe who is mounting a campaign to unseat Miller in 2010—I’d want Rob Ford to run, too, just to share the load of mucking up the incumbent.

Meanwhile, the Toronto Transit Commission met on Wednesday afternoon to discuss, among other things, a report on the work-car crash that killed Tony Almeida last April 23, as well as requested that staff come up with the workings of a “fitness for duty” policy by August, given that Almeida had smoked pot earlier during his shift that night. The transit union’s boss was at the meeting to stick up for his members, but City State for some reason can no longer remember his name or whether or not he’s important.

A couple of weeks ago, City State posted a comparison of the TTC’s logo with transit logos from other cities around the world. The conclusion: the TTC’s art deco identifier, while distinctive, lacks simplicity and ease of recognition. Meanwhile, in an unrelated yet completely related development, Metrolinx—the regional transportation body that is poised to take over the GO system and implement road tolls and parking taxes everywhere and will soon run our frickin’ lives—recently unveiled a new logo of its own. As it happens, the new Metrolinx logo is everything the TTC’s is not. More conspiracy theorizing after the jump.

The new Metrolinx logo, so far as I can tell, appears nowhere on the organization’s Web site. I discovered it in an e-mail the organization sent me just this week, inviting me to a transit conference. It immediately struck me as an excellent candidate for membership in the International Brotherhood of Transit Logos: simple, stylish, uncluttered, and starring the letter M, used globally to signify transit. Take one look at that encircled-M design and try to convince City State that it’s not perfect for marking the entry points to such transit hubs as train stations, bus terminals and, oh I don’t know, maybe subway stations?!

It has been suggested that Metrolinx should take over the TTC’s subway train system and possibly other parts of its network. No one knows what’s in the cards right now, but one thing’s for sure: if there were to be a takeover, Metrolinx now has a perfect replacement logo at the ready. That’s step one.

• Premier backs TTC takeover [Toronto Star]
• Is it time to redesign the TTC logo? [Toronto Life]
• Transit system logos from around the world

I realize that violent crime is part of every police officer’s job and that, to some degree, they need to take things in stride just to maintain their own sanity. But for them to treat violent crime like smog—something that happens every summer, and that no one can really do anything about—is a bit much. Meanwhile, down at city hall, city staffers are busy fixing the problem by drafting a plan to relocate two gun clubs to private property. As for the rest of us, well, there are lots of summer weekends ahead.

• Four shootings, four stabbings [National Post]• 1 dead in weekend of violence [CBC]• Councillors back down on anti-gun proposal [Toronto Star]

As political moves go, Hampton’s risk nearly paid off. The obits for Hampton’s tenure all point out that the NDP lost 10 ridings by less than 100 votes, and without the diatribe the results probably wouldn’t have been that close. At the same time, if he’d found a way of appealing to people’s conscience by inspiring them rather than haranguing them, he might have won a few of those seats. Either way, he has certainly made a lasting political issue of adult incontinence products. Just ask George Smitherman.

In the bigger picture, I doubt that many voters saw in Hampton the kind of leader they instinctively wanted to follow. Compare Hampton to another stiff-necked NDP leader, Ed Broadbent: after 12 years, people warmed up to Ed, while Hampton still leaves us cold. And if it’s charisma the Ontario NDP needs, then they will choose Cheri Di Novo as their next leader.

• Ontario NDP lashes out [YouTube]• Hampton kept NDP alive [Globe and Mail]• Smitherman considers wearing diaper [National Post]• Hampton’s tirade [Toronto Life]• Yes, Minister [Toronto Life]

• “Fitness for duty’ policy to be unveiled for TTC workers: Giambrone [National Post]

Yesterday morning’s Ontario Municipal Board hearings on the proposal for a SmartCentres retail complex in Leslieville were dedicated to deputations from members of the general public. Anyone who wanted to put his or her thoughts on the record was welcome to do so. A total of 18 people spoke. The final score: anti-SmartCentres 14, pro-SmartCentres 4. According to SmartCentres land development manager Fraser Smith, that’s a closer margin than you usually get at an OMB hearing. “It’s very rare for the Ontario Municipal Board to hear positive sentiments for a development proposal,” he said. But more interesting than the final score were the arguments themselves, which suggested that this battle is turning into a generation-gap fight. The proceedings even featured real, live kids and old folks used as props.

On the nay side, one deputant insisted that a Wal-Mart in the neighbourhood would be bad for children, while another brought her daughter to the stand with her. On the yea side, one person said Wal-Mart would be good for seniors, and she brought proof: a group of elderly Chinese ladies sitting in the gallery who held up their hands when they were asked whether or not they wanted a new shopping mall in the area. Another yea speaker, Nancy Hawley, had no groupies in the peanut gallery but declared that seniors wanted a Wal-Mart. This prompted the lawyer for the residents’ association Eric Gillespie, to point out that Wal-Mart has not even declared its intention to be part of the development. Hawley said she knew that, but nevertheless, she thought “the seniors would like one.”

It was a telling exchange. It’s tempting to call Wal-Mart the elephant in the OMB’s hearing room, but that expression is used to describe the thing that everyone sees but no one dares to talk about. Wal-Mart was all anyone could talk about yesterday. And it was fascinating talk, but it was ultimately pointless. This OMB hearing is about a proposed retail development, not which companies may or may not eventually become its tenants. In terms of politics, Wal-Mart looms large in this case. In terms of legalities, Wal-Mart is a red herring. And legalities are the OMB’s primary concern.

There will be more public deputations on Monday night. Any speakers hoping to sway the OMB’s decision, whether for or against SmartCentres, should stick to the merits and drawbacks of the case. Leave Wal-Mart out of it.

• Leslieville resident begs board not to ‘throw away’ neighbourhood [The Globe and Mail]• Vision collision at OMB [Toronto Star]

Between Tuesday’s bus accident (which left a kilometre-long wake of property carnage in North York) and Wednesday morning’s head-on streetcar collision (on Dundas), the TTC was already having a bad week—to say nothing of two massive delays on the Yonge line, the arrest of an alleged ticket-counterfeiting booth jockey and the continuing media coverage of a driver caught drunk on the job. The irony is that, last Friday, the TTC invited media to drive a bus through an obstacle course. I aced the test. I am ready to serve!

Driving a bus is weird. Imagine driving your car. Now imagine that your car is a giant car. Now imagine that your giant car’s giant steering wheel is fitted not to the driver’s seat, but to the front tip of your hood, so that all the vehicle’s weight is behind you. So are the tires that you steer, which is the weirdest part of the whole experience: when you turn a bus, it doesn’t turn in front of you, it turns behind you. To drive a bus is to spend your days as a hood ornament. Once I figured this out, the obstacle course was a cinch: I just had to get intimate with the pylons, get literally close enough to bend over and kiss them.

Of course, this was all on a closed course. I am certain that I, too, would leave lengthy trails of damage if I were to drive one of these behemoths on city streets. The trouble for the TTC is that, given the foibles of the past couple of weeks, it is unclear how my inability to drive a bus separates me from its own bus drivers. I expect that, in the wake of this series of unfortunate events, subway stations will soon (and once again) be blanketed with those propagand-ads about how wonderful TTC employees are. Remember those? It seems to me they were everywhere in the weeks leading up to the union’s negotiations with the city, then suddenly disappeared.

• Out of control TTC bus leaves path of destruction [CityTV]• Head-on streetcar collision puts TTC driver in hospital [Globe and Mail]• Man, 74, dies two days after being hit by TTC bus [Toronto Star]• Working city bus driver charged with DUI [UPI]• Fraud has TTC set to get rid of tickets [Toronto Star]• GO Transit and TTC delays, and weather debris, cause commuter headaches [680 News]

Yesterday, the TTC announced that collector Zahur, 31, has been charged with fraud, theft, breach of trust and possession of instruments of forgery. The charges stem from the alleged discovery that she had been forging TTC tickets, selling them to unwitting riders, and (presumably) pocketing the money. She avoided detection by offering people a pleasant bonus: upon purchase of bogus tickets, she’d offer her marks a ride on the house, so that her own fare box wasn’t stuffed with her fakes. According to the TTC, this is the first time that a counterfeit investigation has involved a collector. But surely some of her fellow collectors must be silently applauding her scheme: The Better Way to Get Even.

• TTC ticket collector charged with fraud [Globe and Mail]