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At the National Magazine Awards gala last Friday, host Adam Sternbergh cracked a joke about Walrus editor Ken Alexander’s drinking habits. I forget exactly how it went, but really, it was a throwaway line. Everyone who ever worked at The Walrus had a story to tell about Alexander and the bottle. And now it’s time to share them over a pint: Alexander’s days at The Walrus will be officially over on July 4.
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It’s always fun when Toronto gets mentioned south of the border, but take a gander at this gullible post from New York magazine about HBO shooting Grey Gardens on the shores of Lake Ontario. By what miracle of motion picture production did they recreate Long lsland–like sand dunes and hot weather in the igloo village known as Toronto?! Sheesh.
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The entire 2004–2005 NHL season was cancelled due to a lockout. In 2005, Canada’s fertility rate reached its highest level in many years. The only people who can’t see the link between these two facts are the hockey obsessed. The nation’s wives and girlfriends—who can never get their men to bed on a chilly Saturday night—understand the connection intimately. And Dolores Claman’s “The Hockey Theme” is the clarion call that summons the men and plunks them down in front of their set. As national anthems go, Claman’s song swells us with patriotism and little else. Put another way, that stupid song is the Pavlovian bell that leaves the entire nation unmanned. And now TSN, which typically airs hockey several nights per week instead of just on Saturdays, holds the rights to the song. Get ready for a long, cold winter.
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Vancouver’s current mayor won’t be running for re-election this fall, as his own party, the Non-Partisan Alliance, has dumped him. I know a lot of people point to Vancouver as an example of why political parties are bad at the municipal level, but this strikes me as a nice bit of theatre, with lots of drama and a fascinating result: the ineffectual, polarizing incumbent being jettisoned. Could such a thing ever happen to David Miller? Should it? A hypothetical Toronto scenario after the jump.
In Saturday’s Globe, John Barber lauds budget chief Shelley Carroll as the ideal successor to David Miller—an assessment with which I fully concur. The problem, says Barber, is that she’ll likely have to wait another six years, since Miller plans to run for one more term. But imagine if they both belonged to some sort of left-of-centre political party: if she wanted to, Carroll could challenge Miller for the party membership’s mayoral nomination. If such a vote were held today, I think she’d have at least a fifty-fifty chance of unseating him. So, for that matter, would Councillor Adam Vaughan, if he could bring himself to belong to a municipal political party.
Mind you, even without municipal parties, Miller may not get the chance to preside over a third term. He is currently laying the groundwork for his next re-election campaign, announcing everything from his intention to tear down the Gardiner (last week) to the unveiling of coordinated street furniture (this morning). He will need to keep up the pace. There is an appetite in the city for fresh faces in municipal politics, and Miller will need to stop our attention from straying.
• Ladner ousts Sullivan, city council in chaos [Vancouver Sun]
• A star who should be mayor [The Globe and Mail]
The July issue of Toronto Life is now on newsstands. A peek at the table of contents shows that there’s a column by me about what’s become my axe to grind: Toronto’s stubborn refusal to adopt a vacuum waste collection system for the West Don Lands and other large-scale redevelopments. After that story went to press, Montreal decided to dive into the vacuum waste game, and their example shows Toronto what a bold, risk-taking city looks like: vacuum waste there will either be a huge success, or it will be a classic Montreal fiasco.
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This afternoon, the TTC posted a preview of its new Web site on the Internet for public viewing and comments. To see it, go to their execrable current site and click on the link at the top of the page. It’s an improvement to be sure, but the truly sexy stuff—the instant updates, the trip planner, the automatic notification of service disruptions, the real-time updates on when the next vehicle will arrive at your stop—isn’t available yet. Those features will be added over the coming months. Once that’s all done, all that will remain on the TTC’s to-do list is to hire more staff, weed out the drunks and stoners among existing personnel, get more buses, trains and streetcars in service, automate the subway’s signal system, conduct a vast expansion of its service and get its union to agree to a new collective agreement. Maybe then we’ll have a transit system that lives up to its Web site.
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The best thing about watching the Red Wings accept the Stanley Cup last night: the Pittsburgh crowd broke into a chorus of boos when 46-year-old Chris Chelios hoisted it aloft. He clearly savoured the moment. Meanwhile, the Pens’ 42-year-old Gary Roberts, a favourite son of Leafs nation, looked—just as he always does—like the sorest loser in hockey history. Watching all those shots of him on the bench, unable to celebrate his teammates’ goals because he was too distracted by his own obsession with winning a second Stanley Cup, struck me as pathetic. “
Remember when Jim Flaherty was a fighting fiscal conservative at war with the tax-and-spend ways of the McGuinty Liberals? Those days appear to be over: Flaherty has offered financial help to GM. I’m just guessing here, but if you tune into tonight’s At Issue” panel on The National, you’ll see Andrew Coyne, the guardian of fiscal conservative purity, get his knickers in a knot, and Chantal Hébert wryly pokes fun at him. Fiscal conservatism looks like it’s about to hit the wall. Tax breaks appeal to voters when their wallets are flush, but when people lose their jobs, a tax cut is far less interesting, since it would only apply to their EI cheque. So politicians buy votes with subsidies in the hopes of propping up the jobs. In recessionary times, Common Sense Revolutions tend to give way to common sense.
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Poor Lisa Rochon. Last Saturday, the Globe and Mail’s architecture critic wrote about the Pug Awards—Toronto’s people’s choice awards for architecture—singling out two buildings as “heartbreakingly banal”: the Hazelton Hotel in Yorkville and the Argyle Authentic Lofts in the Ossington-Dundas area. This year, more than 50,000 people cast votes on-line, and apparently they did so just to make her eat her words: the Hazelton and the Argyle emerged as the night’s big winners. The buildings’ profiles are all still on-line (links after the jump), so you can see for yourself that Torontonians have expressed a firm preference for staid, stiff-necked, unembellished, boring conservatism.
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City State realizes that the most recent round of collective bargaining between the TTC and its union was a disappointment to everyone, but no one was feeling the pain more than bus driver Satvinder Bisla. Yikes: Bilsa has been charged with having a blood-alcohol level three times over the legal limit, and apparently with having a bottle of “suspicious liquid” in the bus to stay fuelled. Incidentally, this coming Friday morning, the TTC is hosting a media day in which journalists will have the chance to drive a bus through a pylon-laden obstacle course. I will be attending. I’ll mix up a couple of early risers to get in the mood.
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Remember that controversial no-strike agreement between the Canadian Auto Workers and Magna International from last year? Well, it appears that the same type of arrangement is informally at work, at least for the moment, in the CAW’s fight with GM over the closure of an Oshawa truck plant. According to the Toronto Star’s Web site, CAW workers blockaded GM’s Oshawa headquarters this morning, even as others continued to show up for their shifts at the facility. They’re protesting but not striking. Arguably, they can’t strike. There is no market for the trucks the plant produces, and if the CAW shut down the plant it might suit GM just fine.
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Some golfing fella who goes by the name Tiger Woods had the gall to say “I don’t think anybody really watches hockey anymore.” Over at Cbc.ca, the story has sent the comments section into overdrive. It would have been less controversial if he’d said our flag was for dorks. I suppose he never watches lacrosse or curling, either. A proposal for corrective measures after the jump.
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The most memorable museum I have seen in my life and travels is the Eel Interpretation Centre in Kamouraska, Quebec. It was owned by a local eel-fishing family that, during the off-season, charged admission to their garage. They displayed their nets and explained Japan’s insatiable appetite for eel. One wall was devoted to collateral damage: a taxidermist had stuffed all the animals (other than eels) that had been accidentally ensnared in the nets, from raccoons to seagulls to a sad-eyed baby seal. It was the corniest, most picayune museum ever, but it was brutally honest; the lesson learned was that eel fishing is fascinating, and that sometimes bad things happen. I mention it as an omen: this morning, the mayor’s executive committee (known to City State as the Committee of One Mind) approved the latest proposal to build a Toronto Museum.
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“It’s ugly.” That’s how the chair of Waterfront Toronto, Mark Wilson, described the stretch of the Gardiner Expressway from Jarvis Street to the Don River at a news conference last Friday, where waterfront honchos announced their intentions to rip it down and replace it with an eight-lane road. I seriously beg to differ with Wilson’s assessment, and I’m not just being contrarian: whether you’re driving atop the Gardiner, or beneath it on Lake Shore Boulevard, the east end of the expressway is a truly enjoyable stretch of road. The usual suspects—Royson James, Christopher Hume—are lamenting that it’s not being completely torn down. So let me make the last-ditch argument that this chunk of the Gardiner is worth saving, for reasons that have little to do with cars.
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The old thinking about on-line content is that if the information you provide is valuable, then people will pay for its retrieval. The reality is that charging for on-line content is a great way to kill the value of information. If I want to retrieve something I read last week, but have to pay for it, I probably won’t bother. That’s how good stories die. Effective immediately, The Globe and Mail has finally broken out of its on-line torpor (thanks to “Inkless Wells” for the tip), so I can now reread John Barber’s columns for free. And there’s the paradox in a nutshell: they’re not worth a penny more, but as a result of being more readily available, they are much more valuable.
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