(Image: Christopher Drost)

Just in case the mayor is feeling a little too confident after city hall’s victory over CUPE 416 in the recent labour negotiations, a group of over 100 planning experts, academics and other civic leaders issued a letter denouncing the current state of transit planning in the city. The letter challenges Rob Ford’s steadfast commitment to burying the Eglinton LRT and calls for it to be built partially above ground, as well as for a form of “higher-order” transit on Finch West and Sheppard East and the conversion of the Scarborough RT line to light rail.

An excerpt from the letter (courtesy of Torontoist):

Transit is the life-blood of our city. After several false starts and radical shifts in direction that have disastrously impeded progress, recent events have put the ball squarely back in your court. This is a defining moment for our city and we urge you to consider the following in your deliberations.

With up to 1.7 million riders per weekday the City could not function without an efficient, comprehensive transit system. Transit is as important to car users as it is to transit riders, since without transit our already-congested road system would grind to a complete halt. Planning for desperately needed public transit expansion within the City of Toronto, however, is currently in a state of disarray and current plans will not provide cost-effective solutions to the City’s pressing transportation needs. As transportation researchers, professionals and concerned citizens, the undersigned urge City Council to adopt the following three-point plan for restoring the City to a practical, effective strategy for building the transportation system that the City’s citizens need and deserve. The time is now for Council to take the lead in building tomorrow’s Toronto.

What’s most interesting about the letter is how the signatories deftly turn the mayor’s own rhetoric around on him. For example, in case Ford or his allies want to paint the backlash against burying the Eglinton line as further evidence of the so-called War on the Car, the group issues a pre-emptive defence: that transit functions as a preventative measure against gridlock. Moreover, on the cost of tunnelling Eglinton underground, they take Ford to task with his own government-should-be-run-as-a-business logic. Quoth the letter: “No private sector firm would be so wasteful in its use of company resources.” Bam.

• Planners, Urban Designers, Academics Call for Restoring Sense to Transit Planning [Torontoist]
• Mayor Rob Ford’s transit plan under fire [Toronto Star]
• Planning experts blast Ford’s Eglinton Crosstown strategy [Globe and Mail]

The Cinesphere is one of the facilities now shut down (Image: Loozrboy)

Earlier this week, the provincial government shut down Ontario Place to make way for a major redevelopment of the entertainment park in time for Canada’s sesquicentennial in 2017. More interesting that the redevelopment, though, is Dalton McGuinty’s government’s choice to have former Progressive Conservative leader John Tory captain it. By all accounts, it’s a deft political manoeuvre—one that effectively limits the scope of criticism for whatever plan the Liberals decide to implement. Still, Tory will be fighting a tough fight. Ontario Place’s attendance numbers are low, the space is expensive to keep open, and the draw has been largely uninspiring for years. While it’s tempting to celebrate revitalization plans, that’s probably not the Liberals’ real agenda. As the Toronto Star’s Martin Regg Cohn suggests, McGuinty is likely more concerned with shutting down a site that costs $20 million a year. In other words, the government is cutting costs and wrapping that in nice political packaging. Read the entire story [Torontoist] »

When I was in the sixth grade, a health instructor employed by the board of education was parachuted into my classroom to talk about puberty. She arrived with two life-size felt cut-outs of naked, child-like bodies—one male, one female—which she hung on the blackboard. After a brief preamble, she asked the class to name the changes bodies experience during puberty. Kids tentatively put up their hands, offering ideas: “Girls grow breasts,” and “You get pubic hair,” and “Boys grow moustaches.” After every correct answer, the health instructor dug into her bag and, without even a sprinkle of humour, extracted small felt swatches of pretend armpit hair and cushiony stuffed pretend breasts. As she Velcroed them onto the nude figures, we watched the nameless doll figures grow up before our eyes.

By that point, a few kids in the class were already going through puberty, so most of this wasn’t news. But it was helpful to have the subject released from behind a cloak of confusion and shame. The rest of my preteen sexual education was provided by Sue Johanson, who was a sex educator in North York classrooms before she became a media personality. On her Sunday night call-in show, she took all questions seriously, no matter how goofy, offering frank answers. She believed that everyone had the right to enjoy sex, safely and sensibly, and I can’t imagine a better way to learn about it.

As I sat awkwardly through further sex ed sessions in junior high school and then high school, I began to notice a peculiar omission: no one ever mentioned homosexuality. At home, my parents had taught me that it was common, a natural phenomenon. Why was sex in the classroom always heterosexual?

This month, Jan Wong’s column (“Body Politics,” page 24) is about why the Ontario Liberals have buried a new sex ed curriculum the government took nearly three years to produce, in consultation with school boards, health organizations and hundreds of students. As you may recall, during last fall’s provincial election the Liberals were viciously criticized for potentially corrupting kids with the proposed curriculum. The vocal opposition came from a group of fundamentalist clergy who object to many aspects of the curriculum, particularly its de facto approval of homosexuality.

I find myself appalled and bewildered that we are even having a conversation about the importance of talking to kids about homosexuality in a non-judgmental environment. Toronto is a pioneer in the gay rights movement; gay Torontonians won the right to marry nearly a decade ago, with little controversy. Gay rights are firmly entrenched in our culture and in our legal system.

Last summer, while reading a Toronto blog called the Ethnic Aisle, I came across a link to a terrific article by a writer named Canice Leung. It was a candid account of growing up Chinese-Canadian in Richmond Hill, the daughter of loving parents who belonged to a 5,000-member mega-church. Her parents told her they were voting Conservative because they opposed gay marriage. Is it possible that a growing number of Toronto immigrants who, like Leung’s parents, view homosexuality as immoral are fuelling the debate? Many congregations in Toronto that promote literal interpretations of ancient texts are seeing their numbers grow with the immigrant population. Did the Tories make a fuss about sex ed during the last provincial election in order to win the immigrant vote?

I don’t envy Dalton McGuinty on this. He is trying to establish what kind of sex ed best reflects our values at a time when many of our values are in conflict. And for all his trouble, the fundamentalists are accusing him of being a lousy Catholic.

In December, when McGuinty introduced strident anti-bullying legislation, he stood up for gay rights, declaring: “Schools will be warm and accepting of all our children, regardless of their sexual orientation.”

A group of Jewish and Christian leaders accused him of using the legislation as a sneaky way to implement his “radical sex education” platform. I hope McGuinty ignores them.

(Image: Nigel Dickson)

“I believe the administration we have right now does not believe that government should be delivering services….They’re like the Margaret Thatchers and Ronald Reagans of the world, who say we should cut government, we should just eliminate it and who cares about the social benefits that government provides.”

So said city councillor Gord Perks earlier this week, joining the group of left-leaning councillors who have ramped up their rhetoric in the city’s budget wars. The phrase of the hour is “radical conservative agenda,” which critics of Rob Ford are using to evoke a diabolical ploy to jettison public services under the guise of financial necessity. Perks added his voice to the chorus, calling Ford’s library cuts “a radical conservative attack on the very fibre of what makes Toronto a great place to live,” and the budget part of a “deliberate attempt to destroy public services.” It all sounds deliciously sinister—although we wonder if the Iron Lady (or Meryl Streep) would appreciate the shout-out.

• Ford, allies branded ‘radical conservatives’ [Toronto Sun]

(Image: Christopher Drost)

A group of health care professionals visited city hall early this week with a petition in hand containing nearly 300 signatures and calling on Rob Ford and his council cronies to spare community programs from the axe. The group warned that many of the proposed cuts to city services were tantamount to health care cuts—a move that will likely amplify the growing backlash against the 2012 budget and make the task of selling cuts to the public that much harder for the mayor. 

From the Globe and Mail:

The coalition of heath-care workers was assembled recently by [Russ] Ford [no relation to Rob], after discussions with health care colleagues, who felt that the message was not being sent that cuts to services like transport and recreation diminish the health of the city – particularly, he said, the city’s most vulnerable.

Roy Male, a family doctor who practises in the low-income neighbourhood of Regent Park, highlighted how cuts to the Hardship Fund – a fund of last resort that pays for items like prosthetics and wheelchairs – will affect his patients, some of whom have even used the Hardship Fund to cover funerals. He also decried cuts to Wheel-Trans, and [their] effect on dialysis patients.

Given health care’s sacred status, not to mention news that the city is actually facing a budget surplus and not a shortfall (and, of course, that stiffing dialysis patients isn’t exactly easy to spin), we wonder if Ford will change his rhetorical tack when it comes to justifying his beloved “efficiencies.”

Over at the National Post, Chris Selley wagers that Ford will, indeed, stop talking about what the city needs to cut and start talking about what it should cut. As we’ve noted before, Ford often seems more intent on shrinking government than simply curbing spending. It wouldn’t surprise us if he reverted to the standard fiscal conservative dogma and denounced the unnecessarily large government (surpluses are nothing more than over-taxation, yadda, yadda, yadda) as a last-ditch effort to justify his agenda.

• Budget cuts are health care cuts, professionals warn [Toronto Star]
• Health care workers plead for services [Globe and Mail]

Kids are committing suicide, parents are in a panic, and schools that neglect to protect students are lawsuit targets
By Denise Balkissoon

Mitchell Wilson had a short life. He was born in March 2000 at Markham-Stouffville Hospital to Craig and Shelley Wilson. From the age of three, he had trouble running and jumping. He climbed stairs slowly, putting both feet on each step before moving up. He fell often, and sometimes he couldn’t get up on his own. His doctors thought he had hypermobility syndrome—joints that extend and bend more than normal.

When Mitchell was seven, his mother was diagnosed with an aggressive melanoma. Her treatments left her distant, sometimes testy and mean, and in so much pain that she rarely left her bedroom. “I sort of kept Mitchell away,” Craig Wilson told me.

“He basically didn’t talk to his mother during the last four months of her life.” Wilson often left his son to his own devices while he took care of his dying wife and ran his family’s industrial knife business. Mitchell spent most of his time in his bedroom, playing video games. He comforted himself with food, and by the time he was four feet tall he weighed 167 pounds. Once, in a Walmart, he fell to the ground and his grandmother had to ask store employees to help her lift him.

In 2010, Craig Wilson remarried, to a woman named Tiffany Usher. After a campy Las Vegas ceremony during which they both wore flip-flops, the couple moved with Mitchell and Usher’s two preteen daughters into a four-bedroom house just east of Rouge Park. Usher had worked as a special education teacher, and she suspected that Mitchell’s hypermobility syndrome diagnosis wasn’t right. She took him to SickKids, where doctors determined he had a type of muscular dystrophy called limb girdle, a genetic disease that eats away at the muscle tissue in the shoulders and hips. Mitchell’s parents didn’t tell him that he’d probably die in his mid-20s, and that he’d spend his last couple of years in bed, breathing with the help of a respirator.

Muscular dystrophy usually brings with it cognitive limitations. Mitchell was labelled gifted in math but severely learning disabled in languages. This, along with his weight and his bright red hair, made him a target for teasing at Pickering’s William Dunbar P.S. Mitchell was ridiculed when he fell, and he was sometimes knocked down to be laughed at as he struggled to his feet. Other students would step on him, then give each other high-fives.

The Wilsons transferred Mitchell to Westcreek P.S. for Grade 5, and he seemed happier. He became known as a goof, even a ­troublemaker—he was regularly kicked out of French class for encouraging other students to tease the teacher by making silly sounds and faces. He found a group of friends, including a skateboarder named Max, who was in Grade 8. Having an older friend gave him confidence. Once, Max taught Mitchell how to jam the school elevator so that he’d have an excuse to skip his second-floor classes.

By Ariel Brewster | Photography by Markian Lozowchuk

Fiona Crean skis double black diamonds. She paraglides off cliffs in Peru. And as Toronto’s ombudsman—our Judge Judy on all matters municipal—she takes on the power brokers at city hall. In October, she pulled off her biggest coup since starting the job in 2009. Crean discovered that over 90 per cent of the 12,000 claims residents made to the city between 2005 and 2010—over sewer backups, fallen tree branches, potholes and the like—had been automatically rejected. Her team’s sweeping, 14-month investigation unearthed something even more gobsmacking: the staffers who were dismissing these claims were lying to claimants, telling them that an investigation had been conducted. Crean is a seasoned political animal, having worked as interim ombudsman for Ontario, so she knows how the game is played. She held a press conference to reveal her findings, essentially giving Ford—the mayor who prides himself on quality customer service—no option but to comply. She made 10 recommendations, which the city manager, Joe Pennachetti, quickly accepted, promising to implement a new service standard by the end of this month. For a resident with a flooded basement or a cracked axle, that means no more bureaucratic foot-dragging on the other end of the line. Within 18 months—a nanosecond in the glacially paced world of government—Crean spotted a gargantuan problem and fixed it, turning her fury into results. Now that’s something we can get behind.

To close the budget gap, Rob Ford wants to sell city assets. Good idea, bad timing. Even a novice real estate investor knows to fix up the house before putting it on the market
By Rob Granatstein | Illustration by Jack Fylan

Cities acquire assets for many reasons. Sometimes a wealthy citizen donates a property, as in the case of High Park; sometimes assets, such as Henry Pellatt’s Casa Loma, are seized when tax bills go unpaid. A city grows to meet the needs of its citizens, adding public housing and office buildings, a zoo (or three), convention centres, highways, police and fire stations, parks, arenas, garbage trucks, landfill sites and libraries.

Over its 180-year history, Toronto has amassed an impressive array of land, utilities, subways and buildings—we’re sitting on $18 billion in real estate holdings alone. However, what seems like an enviable and diversified portfolio that should pay massive dividends is actually a money-sucking liability. The taxes, rents and fees the city collects aren’t enough to cover its ownership costs—contributing to the operating budget hole Rob Ford is currently trying to plug.

Ford likes to say Toronto has a spending problem, not a revenue problem. In fact, Toronto has a non-spending problem—that is, a chronic failure to regularly upgrade and replace its assets. It’s time to operate Toronto with an eBay expert’s mentality: shine up the stuff we don’t need, then sell it to pay for the goods we do need. The important thing is to do it on our terms, not in a fire sale. Ford is pushing city council toward a historic liquidation sale, but with no strategy to maximize the value of the assets. Just about everything except the TTC, Toronto Water and city hall could go on the block, and mistakes are irrevocable.

Asset sales have worked for us in the past. In 2005, facing a sudden deficit, the city sold its streetlight poles to Toronto Hydro for $60 million. Toronto Hydro Telecom (a Hydro subsidiary) then used the tops of the poles to build a Wi-Fi network downtown, which it in turn sold to Cogeco for $200 million in 2008. The city used part of its proceeds from the deal—$75 million—to fix up ramshackle Community Housing buildings. Smart move.

Not all municipal asset sales go swimmingly, however. Chicago offers a case study in the perils of selling potential income generators for one-time cash infusions. In 2009, then-mayor Richard M. Daley made a privatization blunder that sent a chill through cities across North America. He sold the investment bank Morgan Stanley a 75-year lease on Chicago’s 36,000 parking meters in return for $1.16 billion in cash. Parking rates immediately quadrupled, and the city burned through most of its windfall in two years. The loss in revenue contributed to a drop in Chicago’s credit rating, and interest payments rose. Meanwhile, the parking business—recently sold to investors in Abu Dhabi and Luxembourg—can expect to earn $9 billion in profits over the course of its lease.

Since the Chicago debacle, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Memphis and New Haven have all nixed plans to sell or lease parking assets. Indianapolis, on the other hand, went for it, but learned from Chicago’s mistakes. Last November, the city entered into a 50-year deal that included a big lump sum payment, an exit clause and, most significantly, a revenue-sharing arrangement. Already, the private partner has modernized the parking system and is generating greater profits for both itself and Indianapolis taxpayers.

Anyone afraid of more ugly news after Research in Motion’s no good, very bad week probably should click over here—because the Jakarta police have implicated Canadian Andrew Cobham, RIM’s president director in Indonesia, and RIM security consultant Terry Burkey in the mayhem over a BlackBerry sale that left dozens of people unconscious and several injured two weeks ago.

The Jakarta Globe has the story:

On Nov. 25, at least 90 people fainted and three were injured as thousands of people broke through a barrier at Pacific Place mall to buy the latest BlackBerry, the Bold 9790, which was selling at a deep discount to the first 1,000 customers.

Baharuddin said that Cobham should have anticipated that the event would attract a huge crowd, and he criticized RIM officials for causing confusion by changing the rules during the event.

He said buyers were told they needed a red bracelet from the organizer to buy the phone, but that RIM officials decided to abandon that plan without adequately informing people. As a result, some members of the crowd were outraged when they saw people buying a phone without a bracelet.

The brouhaha further strained relations with Indonesia’s communications and information ministry, which plans to sit RIM down later this month to hear an explanation and discuss other demands. RIM has fulfilled several requirements in order to do business in the country, but it’s still under pressure to build a data centre and allow the government to intercept BlackBerry Messenger and wiretap suspects. In a ministerial “told you so,” spokesman Gatot Dewa Broto told AFP, “A company should not promote its products without considering safety. We already knew how big this could be, considering Indonesia is one of BlackBerry’s largest markets….Before the event, we expressed our concerns that this might happen through the media.”

• RIM Indonesia Chief Named a Suspect After BlackBerry Event Chaos [The Jakarta Globe]
• Two More People Named as Suspects in BlackBerry Stampede, including RIM Employee [The Jakarta Globe]
• RIM Indonesia chief named suspect in BlackBerry chaos [AFP]
• Government asks RIM to open access to wiretap BlackBerry users [The Jakarta Post]

(Images: BlackBerry, Cheon Fong Liew; crowd, TheBigTouffe; jail cell, Casey Serin)

(Image: Christopher Drost)

The National Post referred to the most significant cuts in the proposed 2012 budget as “highlights,” which we find slightly unsettling, but the paper does do a good job of rounding them up—closing outdoor swimming pools (both the wading and regular kinds), shutting down three homeless shelters…the list goes on. There’s also that 10 per cent TTC fare hike, which will see transit riders paying a premium to ride more crowded vehicles that come less often. Rejoice! But what’s as interesting as the cuts themselves is that many departments didn’t make the cuts they were supposed to—in other words, they didn’t fulfill Rob Ford’s desire for 10 per cent budget reductions across all departments.

From the Globe and Mail:

Many of the cuts reflect Mr. Ford’s demand for 10 per cent cuts across most city departments. City Manager Joe Pennachetti admitted Monday morning that several departments missed the targets. He said Fire and EMS only managed a three per cent trim and Parks, Forest and Recreation managed a six per cent reduction.

We’ve said before that Ford’s demand for 10 per cent cuts is an arbitrary one. It assumes all departments are similarly bloated, when in reality some are likely not to be bloated at all. In fact, many are even—gasp—underfunded. Plus, the police managed to actually score a modest budget increase, and the EMS, fire and parks departments all remain defiant, even after Mike Del Grande’s comments that “nobody should be untouchable.” Nonetheless, Ford continues to discuss his demands in near-apocalyptic language. But that groups can duck his 10 per cent demand suggests the city’s finances aren’t nearly as bad as he says they are.

• Facing $139M surplus, Ford wants to cut $88M in services [Toronto Star]
• Ford’s 2012 Toronto budget includes hikes in property tax, transit fares [Globe and Mail]
• Toronto budget 2012 highlights [National Post]