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Can Rob Ford tell the difference between wasteful and regular-government-has-to-run-a-city spending?

(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.

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The Informer

Gimme Shelter

October 12, 2011 | 1:19 pm

7 Comments

House of the Week: $1.2 million for a modern, eco-conscious home in Hillcrest Park

ADDRESS: 95 Ilford Road

NEIGHBOURHOOD: Wychwood

AGENT: Lorena Maria Romano, Royal LePage West, Brokerage

PRICE: $1,195,000

THE PLACE: This ultra-modern, green-minded home is in a different league than the rest of the traditional Arts and Crafts–style homes typical of the area. Built by Re-Vu Group Inc. (graduates of the Ryerson Architecture program), the house has clean lines and an open-concept layout that make the mere 23-foot-wide lot feel spacious.

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The Informer

Ford Focus

July 11, 2011 | 12:30 pm

5 Comments

Toronto’s first core service review is out; on the menu: cuts, cuts and more cuts

Services cuts loom over city hall (Image: Benson Kua)

When he was running for office in 2010, Mayor Rob Ford repeatedly assured voters that he could deliver his budget promises to the city’s taxpayers through increased efficiencies and not through service cuts. Take, for example, one of the good mayor’s favourite lines on the campaign trail: “We don’t have a revenue problem; we have a spending problem.” Then, again, just days before the election, he told the Toronto Star that he guaranteed services would not be cut. But this morning the city unveiled the first of several core service reviews, and the long and the short of it is that apparently by efficiencies, Ford really meant cuts.

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The Informer

Tech Wars

June 28, 2011 | 2:16 pm

1 Comment

Ontario’s e-waste recycling program is a “Soviet Union-esque” disaster

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.

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The Informer

Gimme Shelter

May 25, 2011 | 2:18 pm

12 Comments

House of the Week: $1.7 million for a green-minded home overlooking the Don Valley

ADDRESS: 118 Parkview Hills Crescent

NEIGHBOURHOOD: O’Connor-Parkview

AGENT: Raza Haider Naqi, Re/Max Vision Realty Inc., Brokerage.

PRICE: $1,749,000

THE PLACE: Designed by Toronto-based sustainable design firm Urbaneco, this open-concept home is the ultimate in eco-friendly modernism. Twelve-foot glass walls in the kitchen and living rooms retract to seamlessly integrate the interior living space with the professionally landscaped backyard, while the master bathroom overlooks the Don River ravine, creating the feeling of a pastoral oasis within the busy urban environment.

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The Informer

Cityscape

April 21, 2011 | 3:42 pm

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Astral Media finally admits that its sidewalk rubbish bins are garbage

Changing of the trash guard: the pedal operated bin (right) replaces an older model (Image: Neil Ta, from the Torontolife.com Flickr pool)

When the city started rolling out its new streetside garbage cans four years ago, we were taken with them in a “huh, that’s new” kind of way. It didn’t take long for us to find that many of the bins had broken foot pedals that had to be forced open by hand, making the foot pedals a waste. Astral Media, which is providing the bins to the city as part of an advertising contract, has finally admitted that, yes, the bins have some serious engineering problems.

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The Dish

Caffeine High

December 2, 2010 | 4:47 pm

3 Comments

Starbucks’ Toronto recycling pilot program a success

(Image: Quinn Dumbrowski)

Starbucks has finally proven that its paper cups are recyclable. Turns out that most paper drinking receptacles from Starbucks end up in the garbage—recyclers usually don’t accept them. The coffee behemoth wanted to demonstrate that recycling its paper cups is feasible, so it looked to the GTA, of all places, where it collected 6,000 pounds of used paper cups and sent them to a pulp mill in Mississippi as part of a six-week pilot project. We always knew Torontonian latte sippers were good for something.

Apparently, the project was a success. Old paper cups were turned into new ones without any special kind of wizardry, although the Mississippi paper mill that successfully recycled them is the only mill in the U.S. that produces recycled paper fibre that’s sufficiently high quality to be used for eating and drinking purposes. The whole thing was part of Starbucks’ latest commitment to ensure that 100 per cent of its cups are reusable or recyclable by 2015. Still, it seems to us this whole thing should have been looked into a while ago. Like 1991, maybe.

• Where Does That Starbucks Cup Go? [New York Times]
• Starbucks and International Paper Demonstrate Viability of Recycling Used Cups into New Cups [Businesswire]

The Informer

The New Normal

September 2, 2010 | 10:24 am

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City’s new recycling program takes cues from Cash for Gold

This week’s homegrown viral video comes from the municipal government, which earlier in the week released a series of commercials for its electronics-recycling program. The videos star improv actors Mike “Nug” Nahrgang and Marty Adams (the kids know him from Video on Trial) as garbage collectors delivering their “You got an old printer? We want it! You got an old cellphone? We want it!” spiel for 90 seconds.

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The Informer

From the Print Edition

August 19, 2010 | 4:00 am

22 Comments

Seven Long Years: How will David Miller be remembered?

As a kvetchy, largely ineffective do-gooder ultimately undone by the unionists who helped elect him By Chris Selley

(Image: by Frank Gunn/CP; photo-illustration by Gluekit)

Unless Joe Pantalone, the unrepentant David Miller acolyte, mounts a surprise surge, our next mayor will arrive at city hall on an explicit promise to do things profoundly differently than his (or her) predecessor. George Smitherman promises to do things differently with a degree of sobriety; Rob Ford promises to do things differently with a flame-thrower and a manic glint in his eye.

It’s timely, then, to recall Miller’s own rise to power. He was elected because he thought it was a bad idea to build a bridge across the western gap of Toronto Harbour, which is only 121 metres wide. Remember the fixed link? It was a burning issue in 2003. It was incompatible with a revitalized waterfront, Miller insisted. Much smarter would be to pressure Ottawa to deliver a rail link to Pearson airport.

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The Hype

Mother Atwood

June 8, 2010 | 9:15 am

4 Comments

Margaret Atwood calls plan to close prison farms “dumb as a stump”

Margaret Atwood scared us into improving our recycling habits with her novels about environmental apocalypse, but the CanLit queen doesn’t confine her eco-activism to the realm of fiction. She was in Kingston this weekend to head a protest against the closure of the country’s six prison farms, where inmates currently produce much of their own daily bread. Before the marchers posted their demands on the door of the Correctional Service of Canada, Atwood rallied the crowd with a feisty speech in which she argued that, besides being a big step back from sustainability, the supposed cost-cutting measure is penny-wise and pound foolish: the farm program helps rehabilitate prisoners and equip them for a life outside prison, where they won’t continue to eat up taxpayers’ dollars. The author did serious research on Kingston Penitentiary for her 1996 book Alias Grace, so she probably knows what she’s talking about.

True to form, the ever-candid Atwood didn’t mince words in her conclusion:

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The Dish

Restauran-TO

July 2, 2009 | 4:28 pm

1 Comment

Rotten timing: The strike and the city’s restaurants

Pile it on: A mountain garbage continues to grow at a temporary dumping site (Photo by Martin Reis)

Pile it on: A mountain garbage continues to grow at the Christie Pits dumping site (Photo by Martin Reis)

Restaurant owners aren’t exactly singing “Solidarity Forever” these days. With such services as garbage collection and permit processing halted during the city worker strike, restaurateurs are getting increasingly frustrated. Carmine Accogli, chef-owner of The Big Ragu, is fuming after contending with lineups at temporary garbage transfer stations. “Other than the city worker’s contentious behaviour regarding what’s right for them and disregarding the rights of everyone else, they’re not offering us much—except filth in the streets,” he says. “Summerlicious this year is going to stink.” And he means that literally.

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Urban Decoder

March 10, 2009 | 3:20 pm

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If we can recycle paper and plastic in our blue bins, what’s with the big stink over Tim Hortons coffee cups?

City hall’s recent tirade against plastic Timmy’s lids has led many to assume that they’re the sole enviro-offenders in the coffee cup debacle. In fact, contrary to popular belief, neither the cups nor their lids are blue bin approved. Standard takeout cups are lined with a thin plastic coating, so they can’t be pulped with other paper products. And they can’t be thrown in with the plastic-coated milk cartons because the cups melt at a faster rate, making the pulp lumpy and unusable for recycled tissue paper. To handle the oddball material, paper mills would need to retrofit their facilities, and Toronto’s trash-sorting technology would require a $3-million upgrade; so far, neither Timmy’s nor the city is willing to cough up the cash. Until someone does, the 350 million cups that get tossed every year will continue to be lumped in with the Michigan-bound trash. Given Toronto’s commitment to a 70 per cent garbage diversion rate by 2011, that’s more than enough reason for the big brew-haha.

• Question from Alice Abbott in The Beach

Wondering about the waterfront? Curious about construction? Perplexed by politics? Ask the Urban Decoder a question here.

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