Nothing like an old-fashioned on the glacial rocks

Seizing on a new and unique way to sucker people into paying exorbitant prices for water-based products, a man in Chile chipped five tonnes of ice from a glacier in Patagonia, which he allegedly planned to sell as “designer ice cubes.” The Guardian reports that cops busted the man as he was driving a refrigerated truck with about $6,200 worth of illicit ice that would have wound up in fancy cocktails in Santiago, Chile. The ice, by the way, was taken from Jorge Montt, which ranks among the world’s most rapidly shrinking glaciers—it’s retreating at a rate of half a mile per year, according to the Guardian. In addition to making us not want to live on this planet anymore, this story leaves many lingering questions. Is glacier theft the next big bartending trend? What other landmarks might we desecrate in the name of a perfectly chilled old-fashioned? Could the Leafs raise some extra cash by selling cubes of centre ice? Read the entire story [The Guardian] »

(Images: cocktail, thebittenword.com; glacier, Luis Argerich)

(Image: Christopher Drost)

The budget committee continued the city’s march toward reducing wasteful spending last week, approving a motion that will eliminate overflow-recycling pickup and dramatically reduce the number of Community Environment Days. (The proposed changes would mean residents could no longer leave their overflow for pickup in a bag alongside their bin.) The total savings involved? A whopping $622,000—or roughly enough money to finance three feet of the Sheppard subway.

The Globe and Mail has the details:

The proposed change, which will go before the city’s executive committee later this month, got the approval of the budget committee on Thursday, after members listened to the objections voiced by environmentalists.

The same committee also voted to slash the number of community environment days held each year to 11 from 44 for a cost savings of $122,000.

Emily Alfred with the Toronto Environmental Alliance predicted the new limits will result in more recyclable materials entering landfills as residents with extra bottles or boxes opt to put them in their garbage bin rather than storing them for the next recycling day two weeks later.

Many of the cuts proposed during Mayor Rob Ford’s tenure have been of the bean-counting variety, and this is certainly no exception. Sure, Ford ran his mayoral campaign based on the promise of curtailing spending, but we’re pretty sure his mantra revolved around cutting wasteful spending, not just spending in general. As a small-government ideologue, Ford likely identifies most government spending as wasteful, and KPMG’s core services review did target things like recycling and environment days. Still, these sorts of government programs are a serious stretch from the fancy retirement parties, swollen expense budgets and taxpayer-purchased perks for councillors that Ford railed against en route to the mayor’s office.

• Cuts to blue box program urged over environmentalists’ objections [Globe and Mail]

There’s nothing sacrilegious about this city’s appetite for loft conversions, even when the raw space is a deconsecrated church

By Alex Bozikovic | Photography by Michael Graydon

Raccoons are everywhere, and at all times of the day. They’re a menace to private property and public health. It’s time we stopped pretending the city is a wildlife preserve
By Philip Preville | Illustration by Byron Eggenschwiler

It is an uncomfortable truth about Toronto: when it comes to raccoons, murderous thoughts abound. Most of us would never act upon them, but on a Wednesday morning in early June, Dong Nguyen, a 53-year-old west-end resident, did. Nguyen allegedly took his garden spade to a litter of baby raccoons, injuring one and killing another. The incident and its polarizing aftermath were widely reported on, and Nguyen had at least as many sympathizers as detractors. Posters appeared around Bloor and Lansdowne featuring Nguyen’s perp-walk photo and the message “Get out of our neighbourhood you disgusting animal torturer.” Other area residents held an anti-raccoon rally. Raccoons were the Talk Radio Topic of the Week.

Yet in all the coverage, one detail was overlooked: the reason Nguyen was able to corner and attack his prey was that, on that fateful June morning, the sun was already up. Nguyen was able to see their every move.

Though raccoons are nocturnal animals, it is increasingly common to see them out foraging during the day. The most likely reason is population pressure. Stan Gehrt, a professor at Ohio State University who is one of a small group of experts on urban raccoons, once conducted a study in which numerous raccoons were given a pile of garbage to munch on. According to Gehrt, some of the animals walked right into the pile and started eating, while others waited their turn on the sidelines. “They did not have equal access,” he says. “If you are a low-ranking raccoon, you have to be out foraging when others are not.”

This is not a case of raccoons adapting to nature. Nature does not produce diurnal raccoons. And there is nothing natural about the urban environment. Every inch of this city, down to the last tree standing, is the product of human design. Only city raccoons are ever consigned to such a perverse and humiliating life: working the day shift in the hot sun, at the mercy of spade-wielding predators, long after the best grubs and garbage have been picked over.

If raccoons were our pets and we forced them to live in such depraved conditions, the OSPCA would be all over us. And in a way, raccoons are our pets—a massive band of feral strays for whom we leave out scraps every night. The city is like one giant crazy raccoon lady. At what point will Toronto realize it would be best to do for raccoons what it does for feral cats and dogs, and control their population through euthanization? Nguyen’s methods were unacceptably crude, but he had the right general idea.

Earlier this year, a documentary on CBC’s The Nature of Things christened Toronto “the raccoon capital of the world” and claimed there were 50 times more raccoons in the city than in the surrounding countryside. In the 1990s, Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) estimated the city’s raccoon population at roughly 10 to 20 per square kilometre. But the numbers haven’t been updated since, so no one—neither the MNR nor Toronto Animal Services nor anyone else with any modicum of responsibility for urban wildlife—can make an educated guess at the raccoon population today.

(Image: Robert S. Donovan)

City council is set to vote later today on whether to ban shark fin products in Toronto, an issue that came to our attention when Brantford blazed ahead as the first Canadian city to prohibit the sale of the product. CBC News reports that as many as 300 people took part in a protest at city hall yesterday to oppose the proposed bylaw. Councillor Doug Ford is also in staunch opposition to the ban. “I won’t be voting for it,” he told the Globe and Mail. “I’m a big supporter of the Chinese community; if that’s part of their culture then we shouldn’t interfere in that.”

Barbara Chiu, executive director of the Toronto Chinese Business Association, feels that a ban could drive Chinese wedding parties out of Toronto, but Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker (who proposed the ban) maintains removing shark fin products from Toronto markets won’t hurt local business. “The reality is that we are going to ban it and all of those restaurants who have concerns today will all be here in a year from now,” De Baeremaeker told the Globe. Karen Sun, former executive director of the Toronto chapter of the Chinese Canadian National Council, is also in favour of the ban. All of this seems to indicate that this is more than a purely environmental issue (shark fin is the largest illegal trade concerning wildlife, inhumanely killing millions of sharks per year); as the Globe’s Greg McArthur argues, there’s also a generational divide at play among Chinese Canadians. Council is already in session now.

• Toronto shark fin ban draws mounting opposition ahead of vote [Globe and Mail]
• Proposed ban on sale of shark fin soup reveals generational divide [Globe and Mail]
• Toronto shark fin ban protest draws 300 [CBC News]

(Image: Jae Yang in the Torontolife.com Flickr pool)

The conversation about Toronto’s Port Lands keeps going around and around, kind of like some mythic, not-yet-built Ferris wheel. Frankly, we’re already a little tired of it, but the debate is apparently about to get a little more interesting (but likely no less depressing) after two key planks in the Fords’ assault on Waterfront Toronto are starting to look a little shakier. First, Waterfront Toronto insists it can fund the flood protection necessary for developing the area (their supposed inability to do just that has been one of the key justifications for handing control over to the city and the private sector). Second, the Fords’ grand vision will likely take longer, not shorter, to implement.

The Toronto Star reports:

Mayor Ford said the Port Lands would be developed “in the next 10 years,” rather than 25 years under Waterfront Toronto’s plan. “I do not wanna wait a quarter of a century,” he said.

But under questioning from Vaughan, the Toronto Port Lands Company’s chief executive, Michael Kraljevic, acknowledged that the development would likely take 10 to 15 years, and possibly more depending on conditions in the real estate market. And the company’s proposal, which deals with flood protection differently than Waterfront Toronto’s plan, might require a new environmental assessment that could take years.

As Matt Elliott points out, the debate isn’t actually about competing visions for the waterfront. Instead, it’s about proving (if it can be proven) that the Port Lands would be better handled by the private sector. The yea side has offered two main arguments for their case: that Waterfront Toronto can’t fund the vital flood protection, and that the private sector can develop the area with lightning-fast speed—or at least faster than the supposedly sluggish Waterfront Toronto. Both of these claims now look doubtful. Add to this yesterday’s news that the city might have to rip up a $19-million environmental assessment and start over, and Doug Ford’s assurance that we’ll be riding a free Ferris wheel in five or six years all of a sudden seems highly suspect (if it didn’t already, that is).

• “We can pay for Port Lands plan, Waterfront Toronto says” [Toronto Star]
• Ford vows Port Lands remake within a decade [Globe and Mail]
• Doug Ford’s tourist-friendly plan for Port Lands faces big challenges [Globe and Mail]
• A visual journey through Doug Ford’s Port Lands [Ford For Toronto]

From the Globe:

Councillor Doug Ford’s new development scheme for the Port Lands risks a significantly revised environmental assessment, throwing into doubt the promised six-year timeline for his project while potentially adding millions of dollars in additional costs, according to several lawyers familiar with the regulations.

In short, there are significant financial and legal hurdles Ford and his allies will have to negotiate if his designs are ever going to amount to more than a few scribbles on a cocktail napkin. And to make matters worse, Ford also faces a complaint filed today with the city’s lobbyist registrar in response to his private meetings with an Australian shopping mall developer.

The Globe’s story comes shortly after the National Post touted the councillor as the city’s “Idea Man,” describing Ford’s plan to build a sports stadium on an infill a quarter mile out in Lake Ontario (which he apparently drew on the reporter’s notepad, “marking lines around the circular island stadium to illustrate lakeside bars”—heck, you could tailgate from your boat!).

The two papers’ opposing takes fit well with the narrative many have ascribed to the ongoing waterfront saga: fun ideas and private sector dollars pitted against Waterfront Toronto with its environmental assessments and slow-moving bureaucracy. Regardless of perspective, we’re pretty sure this much everybody can agree on: the whole process thus far has been entirely backward. Perhaps city hall should start looking at the logistics before it parades its grand visions out to the public.

• Ford plans to make waterfront dazzle [Toronto Sun]
• Doug Ford’s tourist-friendly plan for Port Lands faces big challenges [Globe and Mail]
• Doug Ford, the Idea Man [National Post]

Councillor Josh Matlow (Image: Toronto.ca)

One of the issues that Josh Matlow has been following is decidedly outside of his ward: the proposed quarry in Melancthon (about 100 kilometres north of Toronto) that could become one of the largest in North America. Matlow previously asked the executive committee at city hall, in turn, to ask the province to force an environmental assessment of the proposed “mega-quarry” project, but before the committee could even meet, the Ontario government beat them to the punch.

From the CBC:

“Today’s decision ensures that a transparent and independent assessment of the environmental impacts of Melancthon quarry proposal will be conducted,” said [environment minister John] Wilkinson in a statement.

Highland Companies says the area has one of the largest deposits of high quality limestone in the province.

Wilkinson says he believes a comprehensive and independent assessment of the environmental impacts of Melancthon quarry proposal is required.

Apparently, the mere thought of facing a non-binding motion sponsored by Councillor Matlow was enough to bend the provincial government to Matlow’s all-powerful will! Er, not really. The fact that an election is around the corner—and that the prospect of luring even more environmentalists away from their traditional homes in the Green and NDP parties is mighty enticing to the Liberals—might have something to do with it. But, hey, what’s the harm in giving a local councillor some credit?

• Controversial quarry to get environmental assessment [CBC]

By Kelly Pullen | Photography by Daniel Ehrenworth

Six months ago, Ontarians had barely heard of Tim Hudak. Now he’s roaring toward victory. How do you plan to overcome his lead in the polls?
If we were to knock on a hundred doors and ask people what their top concern is, they’re not going to say the polls. They’re interested in good schools, great health care and the economy. Those have been our priorities for eight years, and we’re going to keep strengthening them.

Some would say that your legacy will be defined more by the eHealth scandal and the G20 policing fiasco.
I expect people will take the really good things and the less-than-stellar things into account, as they should.

Voters have swung to the right federally and municipally. Do you think that trend is feeding Hudak’s momentum?
The political firmament has been reorganized in some ways. But I can only be who I am, and our government can only do what it does, and that’s to continue to be informed by the values of Ontarians. You know, my dad was the MPP for Ottawa South before me. He was shovelling snow off the back deck and had a heart attack and died at age 63. When he was alive I said, “I’m never going into politics—who needs this?” But it has been incredibly rewarding to shape the future.

Your focus on health care and education is admirable, but aren’t you concerned about the immense financial costs of those programs?
I think the responsibility of leadership is to represent the future to the present. If you look at Toronto, there are cranes almost everywhere. Look at Runnymede Healthcare Centre, Women’s College and Toronto Rehab. Look at the investments we’ve made in our schools. I believe these are the things that Ontarians want. I am concerned with answering the question that families are asking, which is, “What do we need to do to grow stronger?”

You don’t think it’s “How do we save money?”
I grew up in a family of 10, so I understand how important it is to count the pennies. My wife Terri and I were living in a one-bedroom apartment when our third baby was born. I used to do my work on our ironing board. But I was also concerned about the kids having access to good schools. Our son Liam had asthma, so I wanted to make sure there was good health care available. Household costs are important, but if that’s the only thing you’re concerned about, our party isn’t the answer.

Hudak has kept a surprisingly low profile for a party leader. What should the public know about him?
I’m concerned about his short-term thinking and simplistic approach to a complex world. His platform has a $14-billion hole in the middle of it. You cannot address that hole without cuts to education and health care.

How do you counter his characterization of you as the Tax Man?
You let him do whatever he’s going to do. I can only do what I’m going to do.

And what will you do if you lose?
You won’t find me contemplating that possibility. If you said to the captain of a sports team, “You guys don’t have the depth to go all the way in the playoffs, so what are you going to do?” the answer would be, “We’re going all the way.”

One of the complaints about you is that you’re too stiff. Do you ever let loose?
Look, I am comfortable with who I am. Do I reserve a bit of myself for the privacy of my home environment? Absolutely. My most special times are with my kids and Terri, when I can wall off public life. If I wake up and my wife still loves me and the kids are still talking to me, everything else is gravy.

Yet another core service review has come out today—this time relating to parks and the environment and leaked early to the National Post—and the message is largely the same as the previous ones: in a nutshell, the vast majority of services are essential or legally required, leaving almost no room to shrink the city’s spending. The few small services identified by the latest KPMG report as expendable included tree-planting (ruled out immediately by committee chair Norm Kelly), grass-cutting, support for urban agriculture and, the biggie, disbanding the Toronto Environment Office, which KPMG says is “largely discretionary.” Is it too cynical of us to wonder whether Mayor Rob Ford would be happy to axe pinko-hippie projects like urban agriculture as long as suburban parks stay neatly trimmed?

Basically, after almost a week of these reports coming out, the results were best summed up by Ed Keenan in The Grid:

But at a glance, the most astonishing thing about it is that it could have been written by the campaign to re-elect David Miller, or by councillors like Shelley Carroll, Gord Perks, Adam Vaughan and Janet Davis.

That is: the conclusions drawn by the consultants hired by Rob Ford are the same as the talking points of Rob Ford’s opponents: that there is very little inefficiency in Toronto’s government (KPMG says 96 per cent of services in Public Works—the area covered by this phase of the report—are required) and that finding savings for taxpayers will require cutting services.

Seriously, that’s what it says. Rob Ford, of course, campaigned by saying repeatedly that he would lower taxes without cutting services. He said repeatedly that simply making the functioning of government more efficient and eliminating waste would realize huge savings. He said, “we don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem.” KPMG, after being paid handsomely by Ford’s city hall, would beg to differ, it seems.

In fairness to the mayor, there are further reports to come out, including some that will look at delivering city services more efficiently, rather than focusing solely on cuts. And who knows? Maybe those reports will find the pot of gold that city staff have been hiding from the mayor so far. But we think it’s more likely that Toronto is looking at some pretty hefty tax increases (and their kissing cousins, user-fee hikes) in the next year.

• Shutter environment office, plant fewer trees, cut daycare spots for savings: reports [National Post]
• Ford’s consultants: Miller was right [The Grid]

(Gravy boat: Naval History & Heritage Command)

In the ’60s,  McLuhan was hobnobbing with celebrities, advising politicians and forever changing how we think about mass media. A hundred years after his birth, the world has finally caught up with his theories
By Jason McBride

Marshall McLuhan. (Image: Robert Lansdale Photography/University of Toronto Archives)

Nineteen sixty-five was the turning point of Marshall McLuhan’s career—the Annus McLuhanis, the Year of Marshall Law, the heady, vertiginous breakout of McLuhan-mania. It was the year the irreverent journalist Tom Wolfe published a star-making profile of the Canadian media guru in the New York Herald Tribune that repeatedly asked, in Wolfe’s typically antic, hyperbolic way: what if he is right? “Suppose he is what he sounds like,” Wolfe wrote, “the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov, studs of the intelligentsia game—suppose he is the oracle of the modern times?”

In the 40-odd years since Wolfe first posed this question, many others have asked it again and again. McLuhan was right about so many things. Browse his books, dip into any of the interviews he gave, and almost every probing, aphoristic utterance feels preternaturally prescient. Decades before doomsayers decried the Internet’s negative rewiring of the brain, he dramatically outlined the psychic, physical and social consequences: “One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There’s always more than you can cope with.” He predicted the slow death of magazines and newspapers: “The monarchy of print has ended and an oligarchy of new media has usurped most of the power of that 500-year-old monarchy.” And he foresaw the rise of crowd-sourced news: “If we pay careful attention to the fact that the press is a mosaic, participant kind of organization and a do-it-yourself kind of world, we can see why it is so necessary to democratic government.” McLuhan anticipated reality TV long before it was a glimmer in the Survivor producer Mark Burnett’s eye: “I used to talk about the global village; I now speak of it more properly as the global theatre. Every kid is now concerned with acting. Doing his thing outside and raising a ruckus in a quest for identity.” When, in his bestselling book The Medium is the Massage, he wrote, “Wars, revolutions, civil uprisings are interfaces within the new environments created by electric informational media,” he could have been writing about how Twitter and Facebook shaped the Arab Spring. The world that McLuhan conjured is a world that now looks an awful lot like ours.

Okay, maybe McLuhan isn’t the most important thinker since Newton, but he’s certainly the most important—and most influential—thinker Canada has ever produced. There has never been anyone, before or since, as monumentally significant as McLuhan.

A big ol' pile of e-waste (Image: Curtis Palmer)

Okay, we’re not going to go quite as far as the critic who equated the provincially mandated Ontario Electronic Stewardship to the U.S.S.R. We’re pretty sure nobody’s accused Dalton McGuinty of turning TVO in to Pravda yet—besides, Steve Paikin wouldn’t let him anyway. But this weekend the Toronto Star reported that the initiative the government of Ontario spearheaded in an attempt to make recycling environmentally dangerous e-waste more eco-friendly is basically a big, fat failure.

The trouble started last summer with the outrage over eco-fees, and now the program is basically dysfunctional. Adding insult to injury, the program is still collecting money—though the amount of the fees is getting slashed—and not doing much with it. And that means OES is sitting on a pile of money, $20 million high. Naturally, government officials and critics alike are wondering what exactly to do with the surplus.

Here’s how the system works: eco-fees go to OES, which is then supposed to spend the money on collecting and recycling old electronics. What’s frustrating about that is Ontario already has a well-proven and cheap way of getting people to return recyclable and reusable materials: it’s called deposit-return, and it’s familiar to anyone who’s ever bought a case of beer (that’s all of us, right?).

Fundamentally, there’s no reason the province couldn’t start a deposit-return system that pays people cash for bringing dead monitors and old cellphone chargers to collection places. According to the Economist, some manufacturers south of the border are looking at doing just that.

The problem with that is that if the government did it now, it would have to cope with people fishing all their dead electronics out of their basements and wanting to cash in. If only the people responsible for cleaning up this mess were already sitting on a pile of cash and wondering what to do with it.

• Ontario’s electronics recycling plan coming up short [Toronto Star]

(Image: Joe Howell)

The last time we heard from David Miller, we couldn’t help but notice that New York is quite clearly the (ahem) apple of his eye. In a radio documentary for the CBC’s Sunday Edition, Miller gushed about Mayor Bloomberg’s environmental initiatives, including more green jobs, a bike-lane expansion project and the pedestrian colonization of Broadway. Now, he won’t have to gawk at New York from afar—news broke yesterday that the former Toronto mayor is taking a teaching job at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.

From the Toronto Star:

Miller started June 1 and is splitting his time between the Brooklyn campus and Toronto, where he works for Aird & Berlis LLP specializing in international business and sustainability.

The former mayor said his role at the engineering and technology affiliate of NYU is threefold: advise it on how to teach urban issues; help teach courses about urban sustainability, social justice and inclusion; and help organize a conference on those issues.

Miller’s appointment is for three years. He’ll then be replaced by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, whom we expect to promptly blow up Miller’s classroom, declare that “the war on the student is over” and promise all his pupils high marks with no burdensome assignments.

(Image: Floortje/iStock)

When Jon Dwyer, the 27-year-old CEO of Energy Innovation, was shopping around for a place to house his first industrial-scale biodiesel refinery, he didn’t think he’d end up smack in the middle of Toronto’s waterfront. But a meeting with Invest Toronto—the agency David Miller created to attract business to the city—convinced him that the port lands just off Cherry Beach were the ideal spot for his fledgling company. The biodiesel industry, it turns out, is all about logistics: if your rent is too high, or you’re not close enough to your suppliers and customers, your biodiesel won’t be cost-effective or environmentally friendly.

Dwyer’s facility will begin operating later this summer. At full capacity, it will produce as much as 17 million litres a year using only 2,200 square feet of space. Unlike many of its competitors, EIC provides its own source material: flaxseed, which is grown on the company’s 1,200-acre farm outside Hamilton. EIC’s cold-press extraction process generates two end products: commercial-grade biodiesel, which can be used in any regular diesel engine, and flax meal, which is sold to make Omega-3–rich animal feed or milled to make gluten-free flax flour.
Locating at the waterfront has already landed Dwyer his first major client. Turtle Island Recycling, the recycling and waste removal giant, has facilities nearby and has agreed to add the fuel to its fleet’s diesel engines, thereby reducing tailpipe emissions. EIC’s plan is to supply heating fuel for the new condos and offices that will eventually change the face of the old port. And with the federal government’s recent announcement that by this summer, all diesel sold in Canada must contain two per cent biofuel, demand for EIC’s product is set to skyrocket.